'So how do we stop spam?'

Some of the leading companies fighting on the front line of the spam war gathered in Dublin this week to discuss the growing problem of unsolicited email and offer practical advice on ways to beat it.

A coming together of industry major players has been long overdue and one of the themes to emerge from the EEMA Spam Conference is that the complexity of vendor solutions and mixed messages has been a contributing factor in making the war on spam so overly complicated. To use a popular homily it has been a case of 'too many cooks spoil the broth'.

A rush of every man and his dog into the anti-spam market and 'innovations' such as the fatally flawed keyword filtering techniques which resulted in huge yields of false positives did little for the reputation of anti-spam solutions but the industry has now consolidated to a degree and a more unified approach along clearly defined lines is now called for.

Akos Nemeth-Buhin, business development manager of Syntegra, called for "industry-wide contributions" else "too many unique and uncoordinated efforts to stamp out spam could eventually kill off the messaging market".

Manlio Mannisi, UK managing director of Computer Associates, said there is still no "silver bullet" to solving spam but urged users to gain a clearer understanding of the complementary techniques available.

"User education is very important. It's something every company should be considering," he said.

And it is not just about educating users on the techniques and technologies - it's about educating users on not inviting spam in the first place by posting work email addresses publicly online, according to Mannisi.

Some of the most popular techniques discussed at the conference were white lists and black lists - a means of compiling lists of accepted and non-accepted senders.

But these are not without their problems.

"The drawback is that these lists are very user intensive. It does take some maintenance."

Similarly the suggested technique of challenge/response is not without its drawbacks. This is a means of challenging a sender to then confirm their right to email a particular recipient - perhaps by the means of a password.

"The drawback of challenge/response is that users don't want to go over that added hurdle," said Mannisi, warning that it is likely to put off legitimate senders.

The conclusion is that there is unlikely to ever be one standard out of the box solution to spam. More likely it will be a combination of complementary technologies and techniques. At least by getting together to discuss such issues the industry is formulating a plan of action and an understanding of which methods of blocking spam we should be developing and moving forward with.