The process of moving my email back onto my own server has just been reminding me why just about everyone I know switched to GMail once it became generally available: managing email yourself in this age of mega-spam is a huge PITA. It’s not just a matter of setting up a server and doing basic lock-down to keep it from becoming a spam relay. Now you have to install sophisticated local spam filters, greylisting, and other hacks just to keep from being overwhelmed.
Considering that the state of the art in the open source world seems to be [SpamAssassin](http://www.spamassassin.org) and [Akismet](http://akismet.org), I suspect there’s some real room for improvement from the AI old guard. (And no, I don’t mean [Paul Graham](http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html) — he’s done enough damage for one lifetime already.)
We have the same problem at work — our senior sysadmin probably spends a good 25% or more of his time tweaking spam filters and managing blacklists, just to keep the influx at a manageable level. The aggregate cost has to be in the billions of dollars per year, and yet there doesn’t seem to be more than a trickle of funding for real research into the problem.
If we’re not going to fix it, can we just declare email broken and move on?
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