Email isn’t necessarily broken, millions of email messages are successfully delivered each day and the world has come to rely on the timely processing of mail. For businesses, what is broken is that there is no way to prioritize traffic and that there will always be a window of vulnerability when new spam campaigns can get past defenses.
Email lacks prioritization
What is broken is that the anonymous nature of email means there is no way to prioritize email traffic. Imagine if you had to do every task in your day in the order it arrived and only that order. That is the state of email, and it is the way it is designed to work. But it is also inefficient and means legitimate mail is crowded out by spam.
As authentication and reputation systems improve, the remaining barrier to fixing this is that all email servers are built on the same basic design: they receive messages in the order they arrive and their capacity is limited by how quickly they can receive and process every single email, the bulk of which is spam. Some mail servers will shuffle the queue once the messages have been received but they are still received in the order they arrive. Legitimate mail is left waiting for the spam to be received and processed.
Email is broken because there is no way to move the legitimate mail to the head of the line.
Spammers will always have a window of opportunity
Today we can drop a lot of the bad senders. Blocking spam using DNS blacklists and reputation filters drops a lot of the spam but it takes minutes or hours to update DNSBL’s to block the latest botnets. The spammers always have this window of vulnerability to send their spam unimpeded, before their botnets become blacklisted as known senders.
Filtering every single email that gets past the blacklist is server intensive. The more mail you get, the more servers you need and spammers don’t’ care. Mail server costs soar as spam volume increases, use images, attachments and other content that overloads servers, and you deploy more processor-hungry rules to catch new flavors of spam.
Anti-spam is broken because spammers always have a head start.
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