Human Filtering - The Spam Filter of the Rich and Famous

According to Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates gets about 4 million pieces of spam each day. Bill presumably gets some additional legitimate email, but is likely only a small fraction of the total.

How can someone like Bill manage to keep his inbox clean, without risking the loss of an important message? Many of the more intelligent machine spam filtering systems work by trying to simulate human-like behavior when filtering. While machines do help clean out Mr. Gate's inbox, in the end humans do a lot of the work by hand.

That's right; the final word on email for Bill Gates and many other highly spammed, highly paid individuals is ultimately a flesh and blood human being. For that matter, anyone who dare use email without filtering is really doing the same thing. The only difference is that a third-party is being paid to do the processing.

It comes down to economics and privacy. The amount of overhead involved in outsourcing the sorting of email to another person doesn't make sense for most people. However, Bill's time is worth thousands if not millions of dollars per hour. No one knows what percentage of email is actually read by a human as opposed to antispam software. It wouldn't surprise me if tens of thousands of person-hours each year were dedicated to handling Bill Gate's email.

At least one commercially available human spam sorting service has been brought to market. This brings up privacy concerns in addition to worries about accuracy. The human spam fighters are likely oversees, and their reliability depends on their understanding of the English language. Humans can miss spam, and even have problems with "false positives." The service's reliability depends on the quality of the person reading the email.

One would speculate that many individuals also have a "private" email address. Everyone knows billg@microsoft.com. Bill might also use a less-known address "mistabillyg@microsoft.com" for communicating with friends and important industry contacts. This approach is kind of an inverse of the approach of using throw-away addresses and may be a good option for even non-billionaires.

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