This talk will cover some of the history of unsolicited email (spam, viruses, etc.) and how the spammers are engaged in an arms race with everyone else. Any arms race produces a sequence of new attack methods followed by counter-measures. I will survey some of the antispam techniques that have evolved, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of some of the newer proposals that have been suggested. Ultimately, the problem of spam is a social rather than technical. Whether there is a way of getting rid of spam entirely, or at least reducing its impact significantly, is still an open question.

Philip Hazel grew up in South Africa. He has a PhD in applied mathematics, and has spent the last 30 years writing general-purpose software for the Computing Service at the University of Cambridge in England. Some major projects were text editors and text formatters for use on an IBM mainframe system. Since moving from the mainframe to Unix around 1990, he has become more and more involved with email. This lead to his starting to develop Exim in 1995, and the PCRE regular expression library two years later. These open source projects have both turned out to be larger and more successful than expected. Outside interests include classical music (as a choral singer and late convert to viola playing), music typsetting, working backstage in amateur theatre, and finding nice places to go walking, preferably not as flat as Cambridgeshire. Philip is married, and has three grown-up sons.