Spam war.(Business And Economics)(Brief Article)

Evan Schwartz, "Spam Wars," in Technology Review, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, August 2003 (technologyreview.com)

From advertisements for herbal "Viagra" to unsolicited letters asking recipients to claim large sums of money, unsolicited commercial e-mail, also known as spam, has become a major problem for nearly everyone with Internet access. As of the late summer of 2003, spam constituted a majority of all e-mail being sent, says technology writer Evan Schwartz.

While thousands of operators and shady businesses use spam as a marketing tool, just around 200 people worldwide send about 90 percent of all spam, experts agree. Already, most major Internet service providers weed out around 70 percent of spam using filters and decoy e-mail addresses to find spammers. But spammers have figured out ways around this approach.

Several new tools, however, promise to improve things further. Among them:

Heuristic algorithms: Human-created statistical rules that weed out unsolicited messages.