2 Years Later - You've Still Got Spam

It is early 2006, and about 2 years ago Bill Gates boldly and foolishly pronounced, "two years from now, spam will be solved."

Fortunately for the coffers of SpamButcher and other programs to eliminate spam, old Billy boy has turned out to be quite wrong. Depending on whose study you trust, the problem has at best held even and at worst the number of unsolicited messages has substantially increased. My own informal research would suggest the latter.

Considering the company he works for can't turn around a new operating system in under 6 years, it really should have been intuitive to him that the entire world of email wasn't going to undergo a revolution in 2 years.

So, where did Senior Gates go wrong?

Bill had very specific hopes for a technology referred to as electronic postage. Email recipients would have the right to charge senders a certain amount of money for any email they considered unwanted. If the recipient didn't consider the email junk, no charge would be issued.

The idea is a good one, and if the entire internet was being re-architected from scratch, wouldn't be that difficult to implement. The problem of course is that at least several hundred million humans are already online and using email. These email accounts aren't even directly linked to any financial institutions that could receive the described payments. Revamping the entire email system in two years would be akin to changing the oil in a car while it is running at 60mph on the freeway.

Even if everyone agrees in principle to the plan, the question of who places the restrictions on incoming mail first is difficult. ISPs generally don't want to start bouncing email that doesn't meet some arbitrary criteria that the rest of the planet hasn't already implemented. They already have enough issues with their content-based junk mail filters blocking messages that end-users in fact wanted.

The U.S. congress twice tried to mandate use of the metric system. The first was in the mid-70's, and again in the mid-80's. Even though the system has substantial advantages, no one wanted to undertake the cost of making the move, especially when it meant dealing with other companies that were still using the customary system. The same issue pertains to any modifications to existing email protocols.

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