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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/protectingid/0,3800002220,39117988,00.htm

Gates has "magic solution" to kill spam in two years
Will it work? What do you think...

By Jo Best

Published: Monday 26 January 2004

The battle to rid the world's inboxes of spam has got itself a heavyweight champion – Bill Gates – making even more heavyweight promises: an end to the email plague within two years.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gates told a group of delegates that he could crack spam by 2006. The newly knighted Microsoft head honcho added that with the help of some canny tech measures, spammers would be hit where it hurts – their fat wads of Viagra-inspired cash.

One of the suggestions on Gates' anti-spam checklist is setting those sending emails a simple brainteaser, or asking their PCs to do an easy computation. If you're sending the odd email or two, the time and difficulty wouldn't pose much of a problem. For machines belching out huge amounts of spam day in, day out, the cost and computing power needed to send the emails off through the ether would be huge.

Gates also said that the Redmond behemoth was working on another "magic solution" to the spam problem – this time with the focus on the identifying the sender.

The 'payment at risk' system would involve email recipients setting a level of payment that would tax the sender if their email was rejected, low or high, depending on how greatly they were bothered by unwanted emails.

The idea goes like this – if you receive an email from an old school friend and you're happy to receive it, the sender doesn't pay. If it's another offer of a porn subscription, you reject it and the spammer is forced to cough up.

Well, that's the theory at least. But spam filtering company SurfControl's Martino Corbelli doesn't buy it. "I think the idea is a nice one and I don't disagree that in a few years time the spam epidemic will reduce – that will happen. But as for charging someone when who you don't know who they are and where they are – it's not feasible," he told silicon.com.

The tech old guard of spam fighting – the humble mail filter – wasn't entirely rejected by Gates. He acknowledged that filters have their part to play in the spam struggle, but said he believed that they wouldn't ultimately solve the problem.

Gates' spam offensive leaves Corbelli unimpressed. "I think he's right on the timescale, I think he's wrong on the method. We simply don't have the infrastructure to know who to charge," he said. "[The plan] is about as likely to work as I am likely to get off with Naomi Campbell."