OK, well there's only really one day to this conference, but last night there was a gathering of speakers and various other invited people. It was a really interesting night. A lot of people I didn't expect to see there were present...
First guy I ran into was Daniel Quinlan, who is now one of SpamAssassin's most active committers. I'd wanted to meet Dan but didn't expect him to be there because he's a Californian and I didn't think he had a sponsor to send him, so it was a nice surprise. He's got some really interesting opinions and ideas about the spam problem.
Then I also met the CTO of Brightmail, Ken Schneider. Brightmail is one of our major competitors (even though they work slightly different to us). We didn't really have that much to say to eachother, but it was very interesting nonetheless and I found out some goodies about how they work.
Finally I also met Scott Banister - CTO of IronPort. We're evaluating IronPort boxes at work to see if they can speed up our mail processing, or at least help when we have a problem (clearing 600K mails from a qmail queue when you have a loop is no fun at all). It was very helpful to speak to Scott about some more of the internals of the IronPort, and he was a really nice interesting guy too.
Judging by the people being sent here from these rich corporations (which I would say includes MessageLabs) there's some real interest in making this a more regular thing, and perhaps a larger conference type infrastructure. Though that always comes at a price of losing the grass-roots nature of things.
Hopefully today should be most interesting. I think I'm most looking forward to seeing the talk on "Detecting spam as a compression problem", which looks like a really neat solution.
