Spam: four days and counting

On January 24, junk e-mail will be a thing of the past. Or so you would have thought, listening to a speech made by Bill Gates on that date in 2004. "Two years from now, spam will be solved," he told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

A quick glance at the Times Online e-mail account suggests that Mr Gates may not be infallible after all. Instead of sitting here writing this, my inbox suggests that I could be enjoying all sorts of cheap prescription drugs while making millions from the world’s ex-dictators. Each needs a trusted accomplice to launder his loot, and each has decided that only I am up to the job.

Spam can be more than a mild irritation. It accounts for about three quarters of all messages, taking up bandwidth and wasting the time of people who have to sift through it. Spammers are often selling grey or black-market items that may be fake, illegal or harmful, while fraudsters use spam to con inexperienced web users or lure them to fraudulent sites.

Craig Cockburn is behind a long-running anti-spam campaign, although he doesn’t seem too hopeful about anything happening soon. "When the Microsoft deadline for ending spam passes on January 24, spammers will give a collective yawn and carry on regardless," he tells Times Online. "Spam has been a problem since 1994. Do we need to wait another 12 years for a solution?"

Comments

[Chris]

I have a perfect solution for everyone to stop getting unwanted spam. It's simple: configure your e-mail client to accept only messages from people in your contacts.

Apart from that, until there is more artificial intelligence that knows what's spam and what's not, then unfortunately we're stuck with it. It's just like telesales at the end of the day!

[Colin]

I think Mr Gates was correct. My Gmail gets on average about one spam per month or fewer. My corporate email where I work gets three to five per month. So my company's filters are not as good as Google's, but the fact is that spam is not an issue thanks to the hard-working people and their filters at my work and at Google.

Incidentally my workplace (we are a bank) gets 20 million e-mails each month, and 16 million are spam and are filtered out.

[Craig Cockburn]

In response to comment 1, how does a business receive contact from new customers not already in its address book? In response to comment 2, do you have stats on how many genuine mails are being held up or deleted by the spam filter? Also, how much does such a service cost your company versus the cost of having spam blocked at source and so not having to deal with the spam at all?

[Tom Clark]

Perhaps it's time for a new architecture for email software. If one pays a small fee to become an accredited verified user of the new e-mail system, then you become traceable.

If enough people took part, then you could bar all e-mail from untraceable sources: Any spammers can be identified and dealt with on a legal basis.

I imagine there are flaws with my idea; but perhaps it's a start.