CircleID

The syrian delegate too was, in the final analysis, concerned with getting his words into the final agenda, which is about the only thing he focused on doing. :)

I sure wish a stronger plug for open source antispam filters could have been made, especially in the context of LDCs who are plagued with spam and wary of implementing e-governance because of phishing and id theft.

What *was* productive in that event is that a whole lot of figures on how much spam costs everybody were being popped up on one powerpoint after another.

And the right views (yours, the spamhaus.org people's etc views) got listened to by at least a few people - the people who did count in the conference and who were capable of doing something about the problem.

For example, the Chinese seem to be making some very interesting statements - from an initial set of public statements not more than a year back about how they were more sinned against than sinned, and how english spam was hitting millions of chinese mailboxes every day, they have started to acknowledge the huge infestation of foreign spammers that is hosted in just about every chinese ISP. [ref the presentation of Dr.Fu, from their Ministry of Information Industry].

The situation is not as bleak as presented by most people.

Sure it was a high powered schmooze (and snooze) session.

Sure, several delegates were interested in doing as little as possible while other delegates were interested in just getting their names into the final agenda ...

.. but some good is being done, and an organization (well, two organizations - the ITU and the OECD), that have a great deal of clout where it counts, are now taking an active interest in antispam issues and regulations.