In an open statement on the Microsoft web site, Bill Gates has decided to enlighten us all as to the current state of the War on Spam.
According to Bill, over the last year Microsoft and the IT industry have "made significant advances against spam". He does admit however, that it is still a major problem. I think most of us would agree with that.
He goes on to tell us some figures, which are fairly impressive. Users of the MSN network, Hotmail and Outlook 2003 have benefited from the use of Microsofts SmartScreen technology. This is currently blocking an average of 3 billion spam messages day. That is quite a lot, and is claimed to be 95 percent of all incoming messages. So only the few hundred million slipping through then.
Bill admits that more needs to be done. Together with major industry players such as AOL, Yahoo, BT, Comcast and Earthlink, Microsoft have formed the Anti-Spam Technical alliance. They have worked together to create a set of anti-spam best practices for e-mail service providers and large senders. They will also all be working together to try and combat domain spoofing, where the From: section of the e-mail is forged to make it appear to be from a legitimate sender.
The letter goes on with more ideas that Microsoft are coming up with to fight spam, and is a fairly interesting read. We think however, that if a few more spammers were arrested, and a few less people took up the offers of Viagra, organ enchanements and money laundering schemes, then perhaps we'd all be better off anyway.
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