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Gates 'World's Most-Spammed Man'
acehole writes "Bill Gates receives up to four million emails a day, and is probably the most spammed person in the world. But unlike ordinary users, he has an entire department to filter unsolicited " At least now I know why he never replies to my requests for an interview ;)
I believe what he means is, he has an entire department to filter out just his email address
Since he DOES have an entire department creating software to filter out spam, why doesn't he RELEASE said filters and help the rest of the world out?
In his case, I suspect the filters are human.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
Because they're all targetted to HIS e-mail patterns, which surely includes being signed up to thousands of mailing lists, having his address regularly entered on websites by people who don't want to give out their own address, etc.
From the article:
"And so we have special technology which just filters (spam). Literally, there's a whole department, almost, that takes care of it."
I don't see Balmer calling people "special technology."
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The "entire department" thing sounded quite a bit like an exageration, especially since he said, "Literally, there's a whole department, almost, that takes care of it."
In other words, "We pay two kids $5/hr to sit in the basement and sift through this crap."
Or more likely, "We've got a couple network admins that implemented SpamAssassin for us."
What?
Undoubtedly Gates is just like thousands of other executives; he has assistants who read his email for him. An executive of a company as large and powerful as Microsoft hardly would have time to read and respond to the typical 300-500 emails one gets in a day, let alone the thousands or millions he gets from being famous. I feel sorry for the guy, in a way; he used to be a computer geek just like so many others and he's cut off from part of the internet just by virtue of his success.
It does sound like an excellent opportunity to leverage some of that computer brainpower they have and create some first class spam filtering technology. With a test base of 4 million spams a day they have all the sample data they will ever need.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
While there is obviously some human intervention involved, I suspect that there is also some kind of automation. Four million messages a day would just be too many people.
It would be interesting to know what this automation is -- ah the irony if some OSS project was being utilized (SpamAssassin, DSPAM, etc.)
-ch
"And so we have special technology which just filters (spam)."
And what do you call this special technology? What a brilliant new development. Please, Mr. Balmer, you must share this invention with the rest of us. Or, perhaps, is it "sendmail" on "linux" running "spamassassin"? Ah, yes, perhaps so.
Maybe the admins at my work are just braindead, but apparently everyone's so nervous about Exchange 2000 that they won't run any other mail related software on the Exchange server. So if we want to filter email with other software, it goes on a separate box, and they all get chained together. Which means that if they ever want to find out where an email came from, they have to go through three different sets of logs. This is all black magic to me. I code VBA for a living.
Is there a right way on Exchange 2000? We'd do all kinds of better spam filtration if implementation was completely better.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
For example, how much spam does the Whitehouse get?
Do they cite the number of spams the average person gets? There is nothing other than the obvious in that article.
The article might have well said it is probably cold in Antartica too.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
By the way, note that the top three stories in the Australian news are "Wallaby escapes police action", "Bat swoops to bite woman" and "Passengers save bus from plunge". Gotta love Australia!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I think it's more some advertising news for Bill Gates than anything else. I mean, The world richest man can at least afford one of thoses babies which can handles 25 millions mail/days
I need a Sino-Logic 16. Sogo-7 data-gloves, a GPL stealth module...
And amounts to 40GB or so of mail per day (~10K per message). Which is two whole T1 lines just for mail. Probably 2-4GB for the logging of all this mail. 16TB per year. I wonder if they are archiving it all someplace.
I highly doubt that Bill gates is as hated as the president in the world. Besides from the CS community, I really don't think many other ppl hate him. Infact I know quite a few ppl here in US and around the globe who really 'admire' him. On the other hand Bush, well we already know that..
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
(waaay waay off topic now)
:)
Umm.. Yes?
Too many sites whack those w3c valid stamps on their homepages without checking they are valid from time to time.
Knowing there is one less of those means I can sleep tonight and might even be allowed another airhole in my box
Oh damn. Today is Thursday. Maybe not then.
Microsoft has an entire department that spends almost all of it's time to spam. The hyperbole on the journalists part was stating that this department works soley on Bill Gates email, when in reality the department that they were refering to was either an IT department that ran the mail servers for the company, or a development department that spent most of their time working on advanced spam filtering techniques.
Examples : "an excellent opportunity to use some of that power". Conversely : "this tire iron gives me great leverage".
In those cases where you think "use" is too feeble, try "harness", "employ", "embrace" et al
People who use "leverage" when they mean "use" just sound like those sales droids who only speak in buzz-words.
Other sources are also reporting the breaking news story.
/dev/null. If someone needs to get a hold of him and it's important enough there are ways other than email to get the job done and/or get set up onthe white list.
How the hell is the fact that Bill Gates gets a lot of email a "breaking" news story. Is this even news? Who gives a shit. Tell bill to keep a white list and dump the rest to
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
They probably will, soon - this article is probably meant to spark interest prior to the launch.