State of the spam fight

The current Seattle Weekly features a very timely package of stories on the current state of the Spam Wars. In a nutshell, it's not pretty.

As Frank Catalano notes in a piece on collateral damage, "the dirty little secret in the escalating war between spammers and anti-spammers isn’t that your e-mail may never get read. It may never get delivered."

Meanwhile, Mark D. Fefer explores the ambivalent feelings that anti-spam forces hold toward Microsoft, which is cracking down on spam even while numerous flaws in its products help spammers make the problem worse.

On a related note, Wired News looks at how some spammers are exploiting loopholes in the CAN-SPAM Act -- that is, when they bother at all with any pretense of compliance.