No More Spam In Two Years?

Looks like the tech world is certainly ‘abuzz’ with interesting events and happenings. Today I found an article in which Bill Gates is reportedly receiving something like 4 million e-mails a day! Can you imagine having to contend with that volume of e-mail? It would be enough to drive someone nutzo, no question about it.

Most of us have made due with the use of spam filtering done on the server-side (like my ctsdownloads account, for instance), Bayesian filtering, and, of course, blacklisting. Others employ multiple methods, while the remainder of us prefer to settle for a single solution. As technology continues to progress, I have to wonder, what will anti-spam solutions be like two or three years from now?

Well, according to Bill Gates, two years from now spam is not going to be an issue. OK, this sounds great to me. Yet, how can he be so sure when he is still struggling to get people to accept his ’sender ID’ for e-mail? And even if it were accepted, would it truly be enough to help stop the constant onslaught of spam? I don’t believe so. I believe it will take a lot more than just a ‘caller ID for e-mail’ to solve the problem.

On the lighter side of things, I am thrilled to hear that Microsoft has taken such interest in working to defeat spam. With any luck they will be able to come up with some ideas and techniques that work to make this happen. More important, hopefully they can do it without approaching the police-ware that so many of us fear is just over the horizon. We can only hope…

Let’s get digital!