Thursday, 17 May 2012
Is this the end of spam?
Is this the end of spam?
By Mike Elgan, Computerworld (US) | Nov 16, 2011
1 comments
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PrintMicrosoft founder Bill Gates said in 2004 that the problem of spam would be solved within two years. It seemed unlikely at the time, and in fact 2006 came and went without so much as a dip in the crushing load of unwanted email advertising.
Meanwhile, unwanted telemarketing calls were on the rise five years ago. The future of junk e-mail and unwanted marketing calls looked bleak, with no relief in sight.
That's why I was shocked to realize this week that I really don't get much spam anymore. And I can't remember the last time I got a telemarketing call of any kind.
I asked my Google+ friends about how much spam and telemarketing they get, and most reported the same thing. The flood of spam has been reduced to a trickle.
Was Bill Gates right, but late? Has the spam problem been solved?
How Google killed spam
I started using Gmail the year Bill Gates said spam would be solved -- 2006. Even back then as an invite-only beta service, Gmail had a pretty good reputation for dealing with spam. But it was far from perfect.
For the first couple of years using the service, I remember having to cope with quite a lot of spam. At the time, I was getting at least 30 spams a day in my inbox. I also had to go into the Gmail Junk E-mail folder to cope with the inevitable "false positives" -- good email misidentified as spam. I usually found two or three of those a day.
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Google can help you with
Google can help you with some advertising spam, but as my friend Ryan Deiss pointed out to me, sometimes users sign up with their e-mails on the wrong website and their e-mail is sold to thousands of advertising spammers. Google can't protect you from that.