The Year of Spam
Dateline 12/29/97
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"well, i've been afraid of changing cause i've
Stevie Nicks |
1998 is taking over
It is that time of year again.
That time when we try to prepare to get used to writing 199...8 instead of 1997. Although that is not nearly as bad as the change from standard time to summer time and back again there is much more fuss about it, much more talking. Everybody seems to be looking back and looking ahead as if it was an affront to do that on June 10 or any other day. The advantage of course is that the reminiscing and futurizing is concentrated. I just hope I can spend the days between Christmas 1999 and the middle of January 2000 at some remote and lonely mountain hut. I must not, however, forget to bring paper and pencils: changing four numbers at one moment in time, more than ever in my life; phew!
Anyways, 1997 for email was the year of spam. 1998 for email will be the year of spam.
With Sanford Wallace the most notorious and best-known spam artist lost (direct) access to the Internet, AOL and others won several suits against spammers. Nevertheless the pile of spam kept rising and system outages due to spam are getting more frequent. What once, at the beginning of the year, was merely a nuisance has become a, maybe the major problem of the Internet. What will 1998 bring? Wallace will probably return, the question is how this will happen. Will any legislative measures be taken? If so, will they be effective?
Apart from that, 97 also saw Microsoft's attack on the email market with Outlook Express and Outlook. That brought about further spreading of HTMail, which bill be standard very soon. Qualcomm has accepted this, too, with the new version of Eudora Pro using the Internet Explorer rendering engine to display HTML inline. Netscape's email client had pioneered this technique and with the advent of communicator became Netscape Messenger with a richer feature set but a less usable interface.
PGP released the long-awaited new version of their popular encryption program, but it was apparently too late: PGP got bought by McAffee. There is still no official email encryption and signing standard, though RSA can be seen as a quasi-standard with support from Microsoft, Netscape, etc. Yet, its encryption was dropped due to licensing issues from the S/MIME standard (originally developed by RSA). 1998, when both the PGP and the S/MIME drafts are finished, a decision will be made, a decision that by then maybe will be irrelevant.
And now...
...for something completely different.
What spam really means.
Sevenhundredandseventyseven Pieces And Mushrooming
Spam Pollutes Any Mailbox
Sincere Plug And Moan
Some People Are Mendatios
Silly, Perpetual And Mindboggling
Some Poor Acronym, Mmhmm...
