Sunday, November 4, 2007

Where I think spam is going

From email to telemarketers and with the advancements in CallerID and programs like spamassassin, the spammers are fighting a losing war right now. But with the ever rising popularity of IMing with things like MSN, AOL, Yahoo, etc..., I really think within the next couple of years, we will find spammers using these mediums as a new way to spam. It would be just like telemarketing or email spamming from the spammer's sense. They could require you to supply a screen name instead of an email address and they would sell said screen name the same way they would sell your email. The "beauty" in this is there is absolutely no antispam for IM, the spammers would bank for at least a couple of years until some really solid antispam comes out. And then the antispam in question would need to be able to cover all the various protocols such as oscar, MSN, Yahoo, etc which would be a complete nightmare from a developer's standpoint (especially with MSN and Yahoo). Now you can block people on most, if not all protocols, but a spammer would be able to create as many accounts as he wanted as long as the screen name isn't taken. That reminds me of another thing I could see happening to th IM world, screen name parking. It would work the same way domain parking would work, except it doesn't cost any money from the parker's pockets. It is pure profit.

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