The Future is Almost Here

In January 2004 Bill Gates said that spam "will be solved" by 2006. That's not that long ago, on the other hand 2006 isn't too far off and Microsoft hasn't really made any progress in its efforts to block junk email on a large scale. To be fair, Bill didn't say MS would solve spam, just that it would be solved by 2006. It's not even clear if Microsoft will manage to update its aging Windows XP operating system by then.

Mr. Gates has previously made references to electronic postage of various forms. This website has an article regarding one form of such a system. I suspect if such a system were implemented, it would actually address the problem to large extent. Spam may not be entirely eliminated, but it could be drastically reduced.

The trick is getting everyone on board with such a project. Even though they control most of the end-user operating system market, Microsoft has a poor track record of establishing new cross-platform standards. Since a large portion of email servers are running Linux as opposed to Windows, Microsoft would be a certain extent at the whim of open source advocates to help its efforts to create new spam tools.

If anything, most open source constituents are likely to be suspicious of anything Microsoft puts forward. Someday electronic postage may be deployed. If it does, it may happen entirely without Microsoft's involvement.

In the mean time, millions of users have installed their own spam blocker applications and are benefiting from their filtering. The best ones can reduce the amount of junk email to an easily manageable level.

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