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Spammers giving up? Google thinks so…

Bill Gates was wildly optimistic when he said in 2004 that the problem of spam would be “solved” by 2006. The volume of junk e-mail transmitted worldwide is still enormous. But a remarkable trend is underfoot, according to Brad Taylor, a staff software engineer at Google: The number of spam attempts — that is, the number of junk messages sent out by spammers — is flat, and may even be declining for the first time in years.

Google won’t disclose numbers, but the company says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that’s transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year. That could indicate that some spammers have gotten discouraged and have stopped trying to get through Google’s spam filters.

Other experts disagree with Google, pointing out that overall spam attempts continue to rise. By most estimates, tens of billions of spam messages are sent daily. Yet for most users, the amount of spam arriving in their inboxes has remained relatively flat, thanks to improved filtering.

Brad Taylor is on the front lines of the war on spam. He has served as the chief watchdog of Google’s spam filter since 2004, when Gmail first launched. His history with spam goes back much further, though: He’s been fascinated with it since 1994, when he received his first spam e-mail at a work account. Before he joined Google, he worked at an anti-spam startup.

Taylor denies he’s obsessed with junk mail, but his actions speak otherwise: For his own amusement, he Googles the gobbledygook at the bottom of spam messages to see where the text comes from. (Some are from Harry Potter books, he says. He also found one that was an English translation of a Russian science-fiction novel).

“It’s fun,” he says of catching spammers. “Sometimes I think, ‘Oh, wow, that guy’s really clever.’”

The chase may be exciting, but Taylor’s real dream is to return e-mail to the “pristine experience it used to be.”

Chenxi Wang, an analyst at Forrester Research, scoffs at the idea that spam attempts could be on the decline.

“I’m seeing that the overall trend is up,” Wang says. “We’re not seeing a drastic increase, though. And we’re also seeing an increase of targeted spam instead of blanket spam that hits everybody in a large population. Today, for instance, you see spam messages on saving (on) prescription drugs targeted to seniors.”

For its part, Yahoo, too, says the overall amount of spam transmitted is on the rise, but the percentage of spam that reaches its users’ inboxes is down. (Yahoo would not disclose specific numbers.)

Regardless of the overall spam attempts, David Daniels, vice president of Jupiter Research, predicts the number of spam messages that actually reach a typical inbox will remain roughly flat over the next three years. And for most people, that’s what really matters.

“We’re forecasting that the number of spam messages that annually reach the average inbox will hit 4,351 in 2007. For 2010, we think that number will essentially be flat at 4,403. The growth will be very, very small,” Daniels says.

There are a couple of reasons for the lack of growth in spam deliveries. For one, e-mail providers like Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft’s Hotmail use sophisticated filtering algorithms that are constantly updated based on spam reports from individual users. Google says it can delete all instances of a single spam message across the Gmail network in seconds.

New anti-spam technologies are also always under development, and there are already countless anti-spam services and technologies available to consumers, including disposable e-mail addresses.

It’s by no means a perfect system, though. And spammers are, if nothing else, persistent.

In a bizarre twist, Daniels thinks that instead of receiving spam offers from penny-stock pushers, mailboxes will increasingly be filled with marketing messages that we choose to receive, such as promotional e-mails from a favorite clothing store or a bank. He thinks the average number of messages from marketers that individuals receive annually will grow from 2,715 in 2007 to 3,335 in 2010.

“We expect people to spend as much time on e-mail as they have, but we think people will receive more e-mail from legitimate marketers. So there will be more competition to get consumers’ attention in the inbox, but it will be more like competition between The Gap and J.C. Penney as opposed to The Gap and a Viagra salesman.”

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IMAP, YouMAP, WeMAP: Mail protocol’s proponents argue for better support

With Gmail’s adoption of IMAP, one of electronic messaging’s best-kept secrets has been thrust suddenly into the spotlight. But IMAP’s inventor says the move, while overdue, doesn’t deserve the fanfare it received.

Mark Crispin, an often outspoken purist when it comes to e-mail implementations, had a typically-for-him dubious reaction to the announcement of Gmail’s added support for his protocol.

“I am very pleased that Gmail intends to adopt IMAP,” he says. (Note his word choice: “intends.”) “I feel that their current server should be considered to be a ‘work in progress’ and not as a viable ‘ready for prime time’ IMAP server.”

Crispin says if he were to rate Google’s current implementation of IMAP, it would be “quite damning.”

“The consequences of the current server being presented as a completed product would be far worse than their not doing IMAP at all.”

Google announced Oct. 24 that it would add support for IMAP to Gmail, one of the most-requested enhancements to its massively popular web-based mail service. Gmail, like similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo, has previously only used the more popular — but much less useful — POP protocol.

As with many things Google, Gmail’s IMAP implementation is not quite finished. It lacks a few important features, and in our initial tests, we found it to be painfully slow.

When asked to comment on Crispin’s criticism, the Gmail team offered an oblique response.

“Our primary focus is on our users and the user experience,” a Google spokesperson says, “and we’re focused on building the features that are most important to our users. We’ll be updating our IMAP implementation as we go, in response to how our users use it and what they request.”

However, even non-compliant support for IMAP is encouraging to users like Nancy McGough, who maintains a list of IMAP e-mail providers, and shares in the frustration of seeing the 22-year-old protocol so marginalized. McGough was losing hope earlier this year. She posted on comp.mail.imap: “My guess is that (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) will not (support IMAP). My prediction is that they will support annotating messages and that will be another step towards the death of IMAP.”

But now it seems likely instead that Gmail’s role as a trendsetter, as well as the proliferation of mobile e-mail, will give IMAP the boost it deserves. Although McGough, a self-described “privacy nut,” distrusts Google’s motives — “They want to profile you,” she says — the latest move gives her hope for the future of the medium.

“Now that Gmail is supporting IMAP, I predict that Yahoo Mail and Microsoft will, too,” she says.

With POP mail, you’re responsible for keeping copies of your messages on your own computer. If you have more than one computer, or a mobile device, you have to manually synchronize everything — or, more commonly, just live with a disorderly array of inboxes. “I’ll just forward that to myself at work” is the battle cry of the POP mail user, a phrase which makes IMAP devotees shake their heads in pity.

With IMAP, everything lives in perfect sync on the server. Flag a message as “to-do” on one machine and the change is reflected everywhere else simultaneously. In an era of mobile devices, POP is a sadly inadequate relic.

E-mail providers have been loath to adopt the superior protocol, in part because it requires a significant storage commitment on the provider’s side. With POP, on the other hand, the user carries the burden of keeping all the mail locally.

For ad-driven web-based e-mail like Gmail, there’s another hitch. “Companies are worried that, because IMAP syncs so well, users will turn to mail clients rather than the web interface, which means a drop in advertising revenue,” says Keith Coleman, product manager of Gmail.

It’s a reasonable fear, and Google deserves an optimistic round of applause for taking the leap.

IMAP is unquestionably miles better than POP, but McGough’s hopes extend further.

“We need e-mail messages to be linkable, annotatable and access-controlled,” she says. “Basically we need all our e-mail in a wiki with multiple levels of access control (private, various groups and public). I think that’s going to happen soon. I’ll be brave and say within a year!”

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