First, the optimism: I have been astounded at the effectiveness of the "Naive Bayesian Filtering" I have observed both in the Mozilla filter, and from some fiddling around I have done. I can't believe this method has gone from "amazingly effective" to "dead end" in a few short months. It is called "naive" because it depends entirely upon the fundamental statistical method it uses. Suppose one were to add a dictionary (or even a heuristic) to recognize random words and nonsense words, or words with two letters transposed? Add, for instance, one or more weighted tokens to the statistical tables that are a function of this added analysis. It should add, I believe, about as much overhead as a spelling check. I think it is far too soon to give up on this simple, cheap(!), unobtrusive, uninvasive, and so far effective method of self defense. It might also incite senders of email to improve their speling skills.

Now the paranoia: I have watched the Internet progress from a joyful, open, friendly world-wide community in the direction of a wholly-owned means of delivering commercial dumbth, just like television, but with a reverse channel for credit card payments. It is progressing distressing quickly. Every time some scammer or opportunist pulls another fast one, the Internet gets more difficult, more paranoid, more regulated, more complicated, and more favorable to corporations with big budgets and less favorable to everyone else. The deterioriation results less from the bad guys than from the reaction to the bad guys.

Let us be very careful about adding complexity. Each new wrinkle makes it more difficult for the public, the amateurs, the open source contributors to compete with the enormously wealthy folks who want to take the Internet away from us. Worse, the more complex the system, no matter how well-intentioned, the more opportunities there are for the black-hats to exploit. Spammers, fraudsters, and panderers are going to continue to thrive on the 'net just as they do IRL. There will continue to be thousands of hijacked consumer appliances as long as crappy software is cheaper to produce than solid software, and there will always be those who respond to the junk email, because a certain portion of the population is going to continue to be credulous where they should be paranoid, like yours truly. Let us continue to oppose the exploiters, but very, very carefully.