Keyword/heuristic hacks *after* an *email* has been received are simply
trying to treat the disease, and very poorly at that.
It's not clear that this is true. And this is another case where analogy
can be misleading. Many "Keyword/heuristic hacks" (by which I suppose you
mean content-filters) have good perfomance - as many satisfied users will
hasten to point out. Anything that reduces the amount of spam actually
reaching inboxen will have an impact on the spammers business model. This
is a problem where
reducing the severity of the "symptoms" actually has an effect (how big?)
on
the cause of the "disease".
Eradication- complete immunity by vaccination- from the spam should be
the
goal.
What we want is a "vaccine" for spam.
I really don't like analogies like this - it encourages people, perhaps
expert in one field, to draw conclusions based on poor understanding of of
a field in which they have little knowledge. But if we pursue this to its
illogical conclusion... It's held that a vaccine functions by educating the
immune system to recognise characteristics of pathogens in advance of a
true infection. Immunisation is an injection of information into a system
so that it can detect and reject unwanted material early.
It's not clear that the mail transport system posesses an immune system.
Until it does, development of a vaccine would be premature.
:-)
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