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 ;)

Comments

Re:Why not release it?

[daves]

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.

Re:My earlier (rejected) story submission...

[Peyna]

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."

It's not a question of spam

[yog]

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.

Re:It's not a question of spam

[uglyduckling]

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.

He'll have any number of different e-mail addresses for different purposes, inluding ones that only friends and family know - I'm sure he's not shut off from a part of the internet just because every idiot puts billg@microsoft.com in forms when they don't want to give their own address.

Another incomplete article

[NotQuiteReal]

Like most "news" today, the article says Bill Gates is probably the most spammed person in the world - but gives no frame of reference.

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.

Re:Why not release it?

[Otter]

More likely, this was an off-the-cuff semi-joke from Ballmer that everyone here is reading way too closely. I very much doubt that there is in actuality either a "department" or "special technology" handling Gates' email. Ballmer is saying "Yes, we know this is a problem. Given the mail we get, we could hardly not know."

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!