Spam - Same Story - More of it.

Recent email statistics indicate roughly 9 in 10 incoming messages are now unsolicited. It's not clear if this stat refers to email in fact being delivered, or all messages ever sent. With the thousands of different efforts to minimize junk being received, clearly a lot more is being sent than is ever downloaded by users.

So, all projections would indicate Quarter 1 of 2007 should be excellent. Excellent for providers of spam blocker programs that is.

This is in stark contrast to the prediction made by one Mr. Bill Gates, that the problem would be solved by sometime in 2006.

"BillG" (I'm ex-Microsoft - I can call him that...) had a handful of interesting concepts that may have helped a lot, if everyone up and decided to deploy them. Needless to say, the IT community embraced them with the same enthusiasm consumers did with Microsoft Bob.

Almost all of somewhat radical concepts that would really eliminate spam on a global level require ripping apart the existing email architecture and replacing it with something else. The protocols might remain similar on the surface - but some "gotcha" is introduced that mandates sending SMTP servers have to "do something" in order to have their email accepted by other servers. What system administrator wants go first and set their server-side anti-spam filter to start bouncing anyone's email who hasn't upgraded?

Will the problem ever be solved? I have a deep financial interest in the situation, so I'll have to say (somewhat cynically), "I'm optimistic it won't be."

So, Bill - once you really get the whole spam thing figured out - give me a heads-up on the new date things will be fixed by. Maybe 2012? I need to do some financial planning, and could really use the information.

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