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Conference news: The Second Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, CEAS-2005, was a great success. Over 150 people attended, including academic researchers, industrial researchers, implementors of email systems, and administrators of large email installations. We accepted 26 of the 69 submitted papers For information about future conferences, go to www.ceas.cc.

2004 Conference overview: Email has grown from a tool used by a few academics on the Arpanet to a ubiquitous communications tool. It has evolved from a piece of simple, plain text in an inbox into a rich graphical medium that can be viewed, sorted, signed, encrypted, shared, archived, searched, prioritized, etc. Spam, following the growth of email, has changed from a minor curiosity, to a nuisance, to a multi-billion dollar problem.

There have been been numerous industrial conferences on spam and email, which have typically concentrated on shipping products and very practical concerns. But there is also a need for academic-style conferences: peer-reviewed, with a published proceedings, and, most importantly, focused on the kind of carefully done, thorough, long-term research that the academic and industrial research communities need.

Of course, many academic papers have been published about spam and email, in fields as diverse as machine learning, cryptography, natural language processing, systems, security, and human computer-interaction. But there has been no single conference to bring together these communities to exchange ideas and compare techniques.

Email and spam are applied problems, with both legal and practical aspects. Another goal of this conference is to create a dialogue that includes the legal, policy, industrial and research communities.

Finally, email and email-spam have much in common with other fields, like instant messaging (and instant messaging spam), usenet (and usenet spam), etc. Solutions across these fields can be shared.

The 2004 conference was the first in an annual series, and it was a huge success. It received 80 submissions, from 11 countries, of which 29 were accepted. 180 people attended. We expect 2005 to be at least as successful.