i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

As Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s new messaging service, he claimed that it would catch spam and unwanted messages thanks to the ‘Social Inbox’ feature. Knowing who your friends are can help to block unwanted messages from people you don’t know. However automated spam detection might not be the biggest problem anymore in the fight against spammers. As The Economist reports in their November 18^th issue spammers have found new strategies to keep their ‘business’ alive and profitable¹.