Despite Gates' Prediction, Spam Far From a Thing of the Past

Slatterz writes "Bill Gates declared in 2004 at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that spam would be 'a thing of the past' within five years. However, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, has written in a blog post that 'with the prophecy's five-year anniversary approaching, spam continues to cause a headache for companies and home users.'"

5 years or 2 years?

[CannonballHead]

Previous slashdot entry dealing with Gates' predictions. [slashdot.org] It cites two years, not five years, with the spam thing.

I guess "5" looks like "2" and vice versa, but... :P

Re:I disagree...

[DaMattster]

Make that strongly disagree. Spam is even more of a problem. Bill Gates should most likely not try to become the Nostradamus of the Internet because the problem is even more rampant. The problem is, we are combatting spam in the wrong way. Legally, the CAN SPAM Act is pointless. We need to make spam an uneconomical way of marketing and advertising. Spam filtration does not fight back because it does nothing to address the inexpensive economics of spamming. The only really effective method for fighting back has been developed by The OpenBSD Project. They have a spam deferral daemon that literally takes the wind right out of the spammer's sails. If a spammer attempts to send mail to an OpenBSD Spamd enabled machine, they are only able to send at 1 byte per second. This causes no problem for the reciever but could potentially wreck havoc on the spammer causing large queue backups and potentially crashing the spammer's server. That is a fight!

Finally, Bob Beck of the project creates and maintains a list of IP addresses of any machine that has attempted to send spam in the past 24 hours to the University of Alberta. This list is freely available to all. If more people took advantage of OpenBSD's Spamd and Bob's list, it'll be a TKO for the spammers.

Re:Moves and countermoves.

[Baton Rogue]

The majority of all spam comes from home computers infected with a worm that makes it part of a botnet. The fact that some mail servers can slow down the sending of mail is not the solution. If ISPs were to block all SMTP connections from their DSL/cable customers, that would put a huge dent in the amount of spam. Most people get their email through some sort of webmail based system so there is really no need for people to be sending legitimate emails via SMTP. And for the ones that like to have their Thunderbird or Outlook express send their email, there is probably a way that you can make the client get the email through the web system the same as the way Outlook can be retrieved over SSL. Block users from sending SMTP and you block most of the spam on the Internet.

Re:Agree about GMail...

[nog_lorp]

The best solution in my opinion would be a fee payed to the recipient. I send you an email, and one cent. You reply and we are even. Even if I talk ALOT more then you, maybe I'm down a dollar a year. But suddenly the spam business model is destroyed (you cannot send 500,000 emails to make $20 of sales).

Re:I disagree...

[AxelTorvalds]

Yes but it's something that is being run by organized criminal like folks. With botnets, it doesn't cost them nearly as much do it, so the benchmark goes down dramatically, and they can probably steal other things and sell them. If you sift through your spam folder, you'll see a lot of counter measure spams already in place, just random message designed to clog up spam filters, the volume of that makes me think that there is also an element of vandalism to it. There are even viruses and worms and other malware that just randomly create spam, it's not like there is even thought going on. What's worse, have you ever had a legitimate message end up in your spam filter? I check them regularly just because of that.

It's really absurd when you take a step back, google bought postini to deal with spam, that's a nontrivial investment. Spam filters for exchange and mail systems can be very costly to a business. Years back the "good guys" started black lists but a lot of legitimate organizations that didn't have the same tech savvy were snared; it was really vigilante style network defense. Some spammers even took offense to that and escalated things, like they were offended by the attempts to stop spam. To really fix the problem, we need to fix the email protocols, we need strong authentication for smtp peer to smtp peer and we should consider end user authentication while we're at it. Until we do that, there will be spam. If Bill Gates wanted to help, he's encourage MSN and the exchange team to work with Google and come up with a plan to secure SMTP and make it default "on" in future versions of exchange. Before we had the lame excuse that there were too many different mail servers and clients to do it, now if you got google, hotmail, and exchange to adopt a new protocol that could cover a huge percentage of the world and everyone else would follow suit.

Re:I disagree...

[porkUpine]

One word: Proofpoint.
We spent about $50K on these boxes (cluster) and our spam levels have gone to %0.0001. There is maybe one false positive a year. We have 5000 users connected to the system. Spend the money, fire your spam guy and enjoy email again.