I hate, hate spam and fully agree that spammers should, after being convicted, be torn apart by a pack of BigDogs, drawn-and-quartered style. Spam is now 15 years old, and over 90% of communications on the Internet are spam.

Mark Sunner, chief analyst at online security firm Message Labs, likens fighting spam to an arms race, and in a sense he’s right: every time the spam fighters make an advance, the spammers make an advancement beyond that.

Likely this war of attrition will never end, but thankfully modern spam filters kill most of what comes in. Many people think that spam kills some parts of the Internet, but if those people had adequate filters, they problem wouldn’t be there at all.