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

Posted by timothy on from the still-delicious-after-all-these-years dept.

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.'"

6 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. I disagree... by Chabo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would contend that for the average user, spam is essentially a non-issue nowadays. IT departments still have to do quite a bit of work, but all that work means that the average amount of spam a user sees is nearing zero.

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    1. Re:I disagree... by sohp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Folks who are saying "spam isn't a problem because I don't see it in my inbox" aren't exactly wrong, in the same sense that the OTHER Bill, Clinton, was not wrong when he said "I did not have sex with that woman".

      Certainly spinmeisters could argue that this means Bill Gates was right -- for the average user, who doesn't know jack about computers, spam is largely a solved problem.

      Anyone who runs a network or data center of course, would strongly disagree. The cost in technician and programmer time "solving" spam this way, and the cost of maintaining bandwidth that is 90% wasted needs to be quantified so people who have the money understand in concrete terms the value of actually making a major dent in the volume of spam sent.

      To use a possibly-irrelevant comparison: Power transmission and distribution losses in the US hover around 7-8%. What do you think our national electric grid would look like if losses were 90%? Would we even have one?

  2. The funny thing is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most of this spam comes from bot-nets made of Windows computers that have been taken over.

  3. Re:Spam? by JCSoRocks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Spam is the reason I have a gmail account. When I first got an e-mail address I was using a small ISP and spam didn't even exist. After 12 years of using the same e-mail address that thing is about 90% spam. I couldn't find an e-mail client capable of cleaning it and my ISPs filters were useless. Finally I caved and just started consolidating it all in gmail and letting gmail do the filtering for me. So, yes, spam is still a huge problem if you're not using gmail or a work e-mail where all the work is being done for you.

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  4. Re:Agree about GMail... by techno-vampire · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It all depends on how you look at it. As an end-user of email, you're right. Almost no spam gets into the inbox on my gmail account. Some gets through the filters on my POP3 accounts, though, but most of that gets caught by the filters in Thunderbird. However, I'd bet that the people running and maintaining mail servers at ISPs wouldn't agree with you because spam is probably wasting at least as much of their bandwidth as ever. We don't see it because their filters have gotten pretty good, but then, the time, CPU cycles, memory and disk space needed for those programs adds, slightly, to the cost of business of every provider, as does that bandwidth I mentioned above. I'd bet that if spam were to "softly and silently vanish away, and never be seen again," our monthly ISP fees would drop.

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  5. Re:Agree about GMail... by Baton+Rogue · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you read Bill Gates' original prediction, he said that spam would be killed through the electronic equivalent of a stamp, also known as "payment at risk". This means that if an email gets marked as spam, then the sender will be billed for a cost whenever they send a spam email. He didn't say that users would not have to deal with spam, he said that spam would simply not exist altogether. This most certainly did not happen, so he was completely wrong in his prediction.