Microsoft rakes it in from spam

This made me think. Are we winning the war against spammers?

My Inbox’s spamload peaked around 2003 I think. On the rare moments I’ve opened up without my two layers of spam protection (first line of defence at Makepeace‘s servers, then another wall around my own hard disk) I still see about 30 a day, but the torrent is definitely slowing. Diminishing returns for spammers: now everybody knows about spam, even one response in a hundred thousand isn’t enough to make it pay.

Heartening, because I think it was touch and go for a while. There’s a tipping point in any medium where your audience figures fall off a cliff; people will only take so much intrusion before they deem the content unworthy of their time. For US TV it’s when ad breaks exceed 22 minutes per hour; the big networks discovered this in the late 90s. For email, I’d guess it’s when 90%+ of all messages are unsolicited. A lot of people were very close to that point in the last few years – and many must have thought about giving up on email as a communications medium. But email has survived that long time in the dark tunnel – and now it looks like it’s safely through to the other side.