Internet security giant McAfee’s March, 2009, Spam Report waxes philosophical about the nature and future of spam.

In 2004, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates publicly predicted that, “Two years from now, spam will be solved.” It wasn’t. The U.S. CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 hasn’t killed the beast, either.

Why haven’t we been able to conquer spam? McAfee says technological solutions can’t successfully address the problem…

Every four to six months roughly for the past five years someone has gone out on a limb to declare to the world that spam is dead, or at least would be dead soon. And the miracle cure each of those times? Some new technology that returns a binary decision on ham or spam: Our technological enlightenment would lead us out of the darkness and into a brave new world of inexpensive business communications. …

A general rule for all things technology related is that nothing ever really ends; it only gets eclipsed by the next thing. …

The cycle will end only when people stop being creative or stop challenging themselves to think on the next meta-level of pattern recognition. That will occur when spam stops being profitable, which will occur soon after advertising stops working on people. Which, of course, will never happen.

The best researchers and security vendors can do, McAfee says, is to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.