Email blackmail is unnecessary

It's related to a lot of startups, I would think. Spam is a problem in almost every form of communication today--and most startups are about communication. Spam is no longer contained to the SMTP protocol. I get spam on my blog, in our forums, and in our wikis. I'm sure it's going to be a problem in messaging, if it isn't already.

And, many startups are dealing with email. It isn't what we advertise as an important part of our product, and yet we spend vast amounts of developer time worrying about it, 90% of it related to spam. If I hadn't already heard Paul's comments about this at a YC dinner, it would have been welcome advice (and the link to Taylor's "Sender Reputation..." article was very useful). The tantalizing bit of data that Google might someday open their reputation data was also news worthy of comment. The question, of course, is who do we have to kidnap and hold hostage in order to make that happen sooner rather than later?

It's not super related, but might be interesting if you need to send a lot of email. Also, the Google paper is a good read for learning more about how the Gmail spam filter works.

What is spam? A funny way to look at it would be this:

Spam is something (usually ads) that shows up where you normally would expect to see your information, messages from your friends. Annoying? Sure!

Which is (to me) is not that much different from how ad-supported companies like google and most Web 2.0 startups work: they show you ads instead of useful content. Of course it is instead, because we consume information from our monitor screens, and each pixel of monitor real estate, occupied by ads, is a pixel stolen from you.

Same applies to bandwith as well. Ever since I installed ad-blocker extention to Firefox, I've been enjoying a very noticeable speedup in page loading times.

Therefore, google building sophisticated spam filters is essentially a war between spam generations: spam 2.0 vs old spam :-)