That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News: “If you could sit back with Zen-like detachment and observe the dross piling up in your electronic mailbox, the spam wars might come to seem like a fascinating electronic game. Like creatures running through a maze with constantly shifting walls, spammers dart and weave to sneak their solicitations past ever wilier junk mail filters. They are organisms, or maybe genomes, grinding out one random mutation after another, desperately trying to elude the Grim Reaper…

Dispiriting as it is to start the morning with a hundred of these orthographic monsters crouching in your in-box, there is reason to take heart. Measured in bits and bytes, the sheer volume of spam may not have diminished. But advanced filtering software, which learns to recognize the mercurial traits of junk e-mail, is having an effect. The spammers’ messages are becoming harder and harder to decipher. Sense is inevitably degenerating into nonsense, like a pileup of random mutations in an endangered species gasping its last breaths.

Earlier this month, when Internet experts met in Cambridge, Mass., for the 2004 Spam Conference (available as a Web broadcast at spamconference.org), they showed just how far the science of spam fighting has come. For all the recent talk of suing spammers and compiling a national do-not-spam list, most speakers were putting their hopes in technological, not legal solutions. The federal government’s new junk e-mail law, the Can Spam Act, barely rated a mention.” —New York Times