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

I disagree...

[Chabo]

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.

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.

Re:I disagree...

[DaMattster]

Make that strongly disagree. Spam is even more of a problem. Bill Gates should most likely not try to become the Nostradamus of the Internet because the problem is even more rampant. The problem is, we are combatting spam in the wrong way. Legally, the CAN SPAM Act is pointless. We need to make spam an uneconomical way of marketing and advertising. Spam filtration does not fight back because it does nothing to address the inexpensive economics of spamming. The only really effective method for fighting back has been developed by The OpenBSD Project. They have a spam deferral daemon that literally takes the wind right out of the spammer's sails. If a spammer attempts to send mail to an OpenBSD Spamd enabled machine, they are only able to send at 1 byte per second. This causes no problem for the reciever but could potentially wreck havoc on the spammer causing large queue backups and potentially crashing the spammer's server. That is a fight!

Finally, Bob Beck of the project creates and maintains a list of IP addresses of any machine that has attempted to send spam in the past 24 hours to the University of Alberta. This list is freely available to all. If more people took advantage of OpenBSD's Spamd and Bob's list, it'll be a TKO for the spammers.

Re:I disagree...

[sohp]

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?

The funny thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

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

ATTRACT MORE WOMEN WITH YOUR OPINIOINS!!!!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

If you had a Verifiable College Degree from an Authentic University, then more women would listen to your opinions and you'd get MORE ACTION.
Why spend hours studying for a degree when you can call 1-800-IMAGRADUATE and get College, Masters or even DOCTORATE Degrees within One WEEK!!!

Well, to be fair to Mr. Gates

[93 Escort Wagon]

He made that prediction on January 24, 2004 - and it's only January 22nd now. So he's got two more days...

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:Spam?

[JCSoRocks]

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.

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.

Obligatory

[dkleinsc]

Bill Gates advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. His idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to his particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, his plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to his are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust him and his servers?
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about him:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and he's a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to burn his
house down!

5 years or 2 years?

[CannonballHead]

Previous slashdot entry dealing with Gates' predictions. It cites two years, not five years, with the spam thing.

I guess "5" looks like "2" and vice versa, but... :P

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:Agree about GMail...

[techno-vampire]

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.

Re:Agree about GMail...

[Baton Rogue]

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.

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.