Despite Gates' Prediction, Spam Far From a Thing of the Past

Slatterz writes "Bill Gates declared in 2004 at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that spam would be 'a thing of the past' within five years. However, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, has written in a blog post that 'with the prophecy's five-year anniversary approaching, spam continues to cause a headache for companies and home users.'"

Comments

Re:I disagree...

[Rewind]

I agree with this both as an IT worker and an email user. A bunch of junk still comes in, but I rarely ever see spam anymore on my gmail or work email. I have an old yahoo account from around 97 that still gets some in, but even there, not much.

Really?

[pushing-robot]

I've slowly switched all my email accounts (business and personal) over to Gmail, and I almost never have to deal with spam anymore.

I still get a fair number of advertising emails from companies I've placed orders from, but they all provide the ability to unsubscribe.

The only people I know still drowning in spam are the ones who are clinging to some ancient ISP-provided address, or who have a poorly managed company mail server.

If those people would simply find a decent email provider, the spammers' market would dry up and spam might become a "thing of the past" once and for all. But for now there's no reason you can't switch to a decent email provider and forget about spam today.

Re:Agree about GMail...

[eln]

I've had my Yahoo account since at least 1996, and have used it in many a web form. I get hundreds upon hundreds of spams a day to that address, but only one or two a day actually show up in my Inbox. All the rest are relegated to the spam folder. I consider that a very good success rate.

I disagree with your disagreement

[damn_registrars]

I would contend that for the average user, spam is essentially a non-issue nowadays.

Just because they don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't cost them. The users have to pay (indirectly) for the cost of the spam traversing the internet, the CPU time for their spam filter to identify and dispose of it, the server space to store it, and the IT employees to refine the filters to acceptable levels of false positives and false negatives.

Just because the users don't see the spam in their inbox doesn't mean it has no impact on them.

Re:GMail's false positives don't bother you?

[Tacvek]

The false positives generated by GMail's spam filtering don't piss you off in the least? Not even the fact that you have no direct personal control over the process at all? Nor the fact that, unlike other services like Yahoo, you can't effectively disable it by passing it through, allowing you to use your own more tuned and effective local spam filtering solution (i.e. PopFile)?

It is easy to bypass the spam system, but the way to do it is not obvious. Create a new filter, with just an asterisk in the has the words field. That ensures the filter applies to all messages, even a sender-less, subject-less, body-less email. Then on the actions page select "Never send it to Spam". Apply the filter. Now the spam filtering is bypassed, and no messages will ever end up in the spam folder.