RSS to replace email? Nah.. I've heard a lot about how Outlook 2003, both alone and in combination with Exchange Server 2003, has been beefed up to fight the war on spam. From a client-only perspective, it doesn't look too promising. Apart from filtering messages that have been externally processed — for example, by SpamAssassin — the primary strategy appears to be blacklisting or whitelisting senders. As this screenshot illustrates, Sobig-like worms destroy that strategy. I can neither whitelist nor blacklist email appearing to be from Dave Ogle or Anne Manes or Tom Thompson or Lowell Rapaport. Quite likely, none of these folks has even been infected with the worm. Their names just happened to be chosen randomly from the address books of users who were infected. … [Jon's Radio]
I found this post more interesting on the second reading. It took a second reading before I understood the problem. The screenshot I omitted showed an inbox with a lot of email generated from the Sobig worm. Jon says he uses three lines of defense against spam, SpamAssassin, SpamPal, and SpamBayes. He has a a fourth line of defense he did not mention, virus checking software. I expect these emails are probably clean of viruses or worms but are not valid communication from the sender. There lies the problem. You cannot filter this mailbox using only a whitelist or blacklist. An external sophisticated spam processor, such as SpamAssassin, is required to categorize the emails. However, I have not read or seen Microsoft pushing Outlook's new spam processing support as a total spam solution. I got the distinct impression that Microsoft was opening the api's slightly to make integrating external processing easier. Maybe we can get an open source version of SpamAssassin running with Exchange 2003. Deersoft's Spamkiller is nice but free is better if you are competing with a free SpamAssassin on Linux.