Gates anti-spam 1 year progress report |
Loading ...Once upon a time, in a land far, far away Bill Gates vowed to eradicate spam within two years and 80% of experts quickly predicted Gate’s prediction was “unrealistic.”
Well, over a year has gone by and in my opinion the Fairy Spam Mother has had little improvement in staying away from our inboxes.
Apparently the folks at Pew Internet have gone and done some sort of study and come up with the conclusion that people are more accepting of spam. 
Fifty-three percent of adult e-mail users in the United States now say they trust e-mail less because of spam, down from 62 percent a year ago and about the same as a June 2003 Pew survey. Pew also found that 22 percent of e-mail users say they are spending less time on e-mail because of spam, down from 29 percent last year. In 2003, it was 25 percent.
On the positive side Gmail in particular has improved their spam filtering and it doesn’t totally suck any more. It’s gotten to where we’re not as easily filling up the space provided, especially now that they have increased the storage amount in excess of 2GB (and still growing, BTW). Good job, Gmail team, now how many more years (snicker) before you get out of beta?
The only spam I really get, thanks to Outlook and Norton, is trackback spam. I might get 1-2 other messages a day, but Outlook (mainly) and Norton (mildly) are happy to take care of my needs. In 4 months, I’ve only found 2 false positives as well.
Spam simply isn’t really a problem for me anymore.
Comment by Jeremy C. Wright — April 12, 2005 @ 8:49 am PST
Hi Jeremy -
I won’t use Norton (even though I purchased a license for the software, actually) because of that anti-business ad stripping feature they provide in their software. Also, when we did try using them for review purposes six months or so ago, they had a fairly high false positive ratio when dealing with 5-7k emails a day. For awhile we were pushing 10k emails a day but since Gmail filtering (as well as Earthlink) has improved, it is now back under 7k a day again. So the situation has improved within the last 30-60 days.
Overall, though, Gates hasn’t done much of anything since his prediction except sue spammers. Glad to see him doing that, but that alone won’t solve the problem. Some of the other things he mentioned might, but it seems we’re going to have to wait for Longhorn to see that.
And as a matter of general principle, I will not support any company that has any type of feature that changes or strips content on our websites (norton antispam can removes traditional sized banner ads and button). I uninstalled the Google toolbar when they added the auto-link feature from most of our machines. The Firefox extension had everything I needed with that anyway.
Comment by TDavid — April 12, 2005 @ 10:48 am PST
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