Comparing unsolicited e-mail, or spam, to theft, hundreds of programmers and anti-spam activists surfaced at MIT this weekend to discuss ways of lessening the threat.rnrn
It costs about $250 to send a million spams, but it represents about $2,800 in lost wages, at the federal minimum wage, for those million spams to be deleted, said William Yerazunis, a researcher at MIT's Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories.rnrn
A tentpole of the conference was Yerazunis' CRM114 Discriminator language, which matches short phrases from incoming text with phrases that the user previously supplied as example text, catching spam that might not exactly match standard spam text.rnrn
A casual poll of AVN staffers revealed a spam saturation of 75%. Most of it was porn, strangely enough, but some spam advertised university diplomas from unaccredited institutions which, although potentially helpful, was still unsolicited. AVN's spam exposure is higher than the national average, still significant at almost 40%.rnrn
Internet Service Providers continually roll out anti-spam software and filtering programs, applications that determine which mail is likely spam, but spammers just as frequently find ways to evade detection, including the crafting of messages that break apart before a filter and then reassemble.rnrn
"There are some really clever people making spam difficult to filter," said conference attendee John Graham.rnrn
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