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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.'"

2 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.

    --
    Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
  2. 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.