Filtering software: The Mary Whitehouse of IT?

At the end of last week some of the biggest vendors in tech gathered at the offices of silicon.com's parent company to discuss a problem all email users are familiar with - spam.

Spam has been talked about for years, but it is now reaching epidemic proportions. Emails touting pornography, 'Buy your degree now!', septic tanks and Viagra are clogging inboxes. Meanwhile so-called 419 scam emails, usually claiming to be from Nigeria, Sierra Leone or South Africa, but increasingly citing other countries further afield, seemingly know no bounds. Over the weekend silicon's editorial inbox alone received a dozen such mailings.

Unsurprisingly everyone is looking to a technological solution to this nuisance. However, the big problem isn't in filtering emails - companies such as software vendor SurfControl and ISP Star Internet, both from the UK, are doing very well in this space. Filtering accurately is the major headache, as this kind of software can sometimes do a fair impression of Mary Whitehouse (ie. stop you from seeing things you really want to see).

We recently spoke to David Hamilton, IT director at international law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. The legal profession is at the forefront of workflow technology because complex documents must be shared with total surety.

He paints the picture of partners deluged with emails, commonly containing attachments with 100 pages of subtly updated content. Sifting through spam doesn't help and so he has implemented a back end solution from iManage for workflow and filtering.

The trouble with any filtering technology is that if it is 95 per cent effective, those five per cent of emails that don't get through but should could destroy a business.

And at a law firm? According to Hamilton, one previous provider managed 99.99 per cent accuracy - "And that wasn't good enough."

Technology will evolve to tackle spam. Spam will be tweaked to find ways of avoiding the barriers in its way. In the end, most systems will still need an element of human judgement.