Early in the morning lying awake on the couch, for some reason my thoughts turned to spam. My first thought was "how could spam defeat the current filtering mechanisms?" Why should one even waste time thinking about such a thing I don't know. However it did occur to me that making spam "better" would be pretty easy. I don't get a lot of spam anymore, and the little bit that I do get I don't tend to look at very closely, but the one thing that I have noticed (as has everyone else I'm sure) is the bizarre series of random words that they use at the beginning of the message. Initially these words seem pretty random. Over time the stream of words seem to start to make a little bit more sense, seemed to fit together. I theorized that probably they were just doing what Claude Shannon had mentioned in one of his information theory papers ages ago. Picked a book as a source, find a random word, skip forward a random amount then scan until you find the same word and write down the next word following it. Repeat with this new word. Doing this you will achieve very strong sentence like structures.
So it occurred to me, why not take the next step? I.e. put actual content of interest to people inside the spam. Turn spam into a legitimate medium (sort of). Television, radio, magazines, newspapers, websites -- they're basically all the same -- fronts for advertising. They are spam. However, they are spam with a difference. They are spam mixed with some useful content that people actually want to see/hear/read. Why not create spam that actually contains useful content. Things like jokes, magazine style articles, news clips. Make spam interesting. Make spam funny. Give people a reason to want to read it. This has many side effects. First, it has a much better chance of getting through the filters. Actual content looks like well, actual content that just happens to have some advertising at the bottom. Second, people might actually find it useful, they might actually read it, they might not hit the spam button to filter it (and similar items) from the system. Can you imagine how hard it would be to filter spam when some people actually find the spam interesting, or almost not-spam?
Don't get me wrong, I hate spam (but like I said the filters are doing such a good job now I hardly ever get any anyways). I was just thinking on the couch and this is what I came up with, so the next thing I was thinking of on the couch was "So how can we get rid of spam for good?". Strangely, this also seemed pretty easy. Implement a verification system. If an e-mail is not in my contact list an e-mail is sent back to the sender asking them to verify that they are a real person and that this is a real e-mail address (of course they won't get the e-mail at all if this is a fake e-mail address). You could then have the standard verification process. The usual noisy numbers hidden in a image, for example, or hopefully some new verification processes that take advantage of things we can do easily that computers cannot (3-D recognition, pattern recognition, movement detection, etc. -- (verification seems like a potential topic for future thoughts). You could add people directly to your contact list in which case they don't even have to go through this process. You must also check that e-mails you get requesting verification are actually responses to e-mails that you have sent (to avoid spam being hidden in fake verification request e-mails). Spam would have a very difficult time getting past such a system and the inconvenience for people is relatively minimal since I'm sure that the vast majority of e-mails are from people that have already contacted us in the past and in are in our contact list already.