When I worked at EFF, I was the semi-official go-to person on spam issues, largely because nobody else wanted to do it. Having never dealt much with the spam wars, I found the topic intriguing. At that time there were a lot of discussions about “sender authentication” and that raised concerns about anonymous speech, which is in many ways the cornerstone of free speech online. So I viewed the “spam problem” as one of overzealous spam filtering rather than stopping spam.

That’s probably why, in my two years of policy wonking about spam, I never had a chance to sit down with anybody and talk about techniques spammers use to get their spurts of weirdness into my inbox. I knew that every strange chunk of text and oddball gif I received was designed to circumvent spam filter programs, but I didn’t know why. That’s why I called up IronPort antispam architect Daniel Quinlan and chatted with him about the true meaning of spam. His answers might surprise you. Find out more about why you receive random quotes from Beowulf and pictures of pink, bouncy text in your spam in my column.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 5:09 pm.
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