Since about a week ICQ seems to be the 2nd spammiest part of the Internet, at least for me. Not a single day passes without at least a couple of spam messages. This alone wouldn’t be a real problem since you can normally block messages from people who are not on your contact list. But now spammers have started to put their junk into the authorization requests, which is something that can’t be blocked that easily. Here it would be great, if there was a way to block authorization requests including specific strings.
Is IM now the next big market for spammers? At least to me it looks that way. I’ve not yet seen any IM client or service that has means to fight spammers. Sure, you can always start blocking people but the maximum of what you can do now, is block people who are not on your contact list, which simply means, that spammers move over to the autorization form. I guess it will become quite interesting when IM spamming increases. Will IM clients also get anti-spam-mechanisms like most e-mail clients? And who will implement something like that first? The FOSS scene or companies like Mirabilis and Microsoft?
In my opinion the first step should be, blocking all authorization requests that include an URL. A webaddress simply has nothing to do with trying to get in contact with someone via IM.
Note: I’ve used ICQ here more or less as synonym for IM throughout this post simply because it’s been my primary IM-service for the last years.
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