How bad is spam, really?
Farber: I’m seeing a fairly wide variety of people, from old, grizzled network people to major investors in technology companies who say: “Who needs this pain? I get spammed to death. I get viruses. I get the spam caused by viruses. I get forged messages.” One guy sent me a note today saying, “I spend about an hour and a half a day cleaning out my e-mail.” And he uses a spam filter, but there’s still a major amount of noise. The reliability of e-mail has suffered incredibly from the need to put in spam filters that don’t work that well. I think that there’s a danger that people are going to say more and more: Who needs it? At some point in the game you’re going to see people saying: “I can make a phone call; with voice mail, maybe I’m better off. Over the last six months the amount of spam has gone up phenomenally. This last virus or worm that started generating huge volumes of e-mail sort of broke the back. It’s not too late, but I think it’s getting to be close to too late. If you be
