Old spam may become collector's item

My Zone Alarm quarantines everything that looks suspicious. But talk about false positives.

When I checked the ‘spams' I found a letter from a Nigerian businessman offering an incredible deal. For an ten grand initial investment, he's going to post me a million quid. Just a couple more weeks to go and I'm laughing.

How often do you meet a philanthropist like that? If I'd relied on Zone Alarm, the deal never would have happened.

That's the problem with the conventional wisdom on spam, says Damian Schmidt, the CEO of Strato, an ambitious German web hosting company.

Symantec and Kapsersky are looking at the problem arse about face, he argues [I‘m paraphrasing here].

"They look in the wrong direction. Don't look at spam. Look at ham," says the teutonic web commerce host.

The idea is to search for ‘ham' - useful emails - more thoroughly, and pick them out of the junk folder. Sounds a bit clunky, but mein host insists there's patented methods in this madness.

Strato has worked with the Max-Planck-Institute and Humboldt University to develop a module that enhances the identification of ham, based on game theory. So they're adding two new elements to the war against spam, finger printing and social graphs. Finger printing identifies agents who dispatch large numbers of identical emails and issues a warning (sort of, “hey, big sender!”). Social graphs use artificial intelligence to map the social relevance of a contact to you.

The upshot? These patented techniques will make spam a thing of the past. "You should keep that email from that Nigerian businessman," says Schmidt, "it will be a collector's item, worth a lot of money in the future."

Er, hello, it's already worth a million pounds. Honestly, these Germans are so gullible. µ