How The First JamSpam Meeting Went

from the not-bad,-but-not-great dept

A few weeks ago we mentioned the idea of JamSpam - an industry consortium working on a way to build anti-spam tools into the protocol level of email. It still is the most creative (and potentially workaable) solution I've heard of - even if it has plenty of potential problems to deal with. Now, David Berlind is back with an update of how the first meeting went. He starts out by re-explaining his reasoning behind creating a "holistic" approach to blocking spam - since most efforts to date have targeted a single aspect of spam and how to block it. Then comes the disappointing, but somewhat expected news: when you get together 65 people from different companies with different agendas, there's no way they're all going to agree on anything. The meeting and its arguments seems to have changed the focus of JamSpam slightly. They decided forming yet another standards body would be time-consuming and eventually useless. It also sounds like much of the meeting devolved into a fight over what spam really was. So, now they're taking "baby steps" to move forward - and each attendee is supposed to come back to the next meeting with an explanation of what they think the "problem" is. I'm still hopeful that something will come out of this, but I'm quickly reminded of why not much gets done by committee...

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