Bill Gates wages war on spam

Microsoft software giant releases strategies in keeping hated e-mails away

2006: the year of the final defeat of spam. This is not the title of a sci-fi movie, but Bill Gates' war cry. A few weeks ago Gates attacked spam with an unusual vigour, announcing that by 2006 global spammers will have a hard time. In Davos, Switzerland, the founder and Chief Software Designer of Microsoft boldly declared, "In two years' time spam will be a solved problem."
This plague, as analysts call it, grew dramatically in the last two years, becoming a priority almost on a par with security. "Spam", those junk messages that fill your email inbox, costs the average business more than US $2.5 million a year in a combination of lost productivity, consumed bandwidth, used storage capacity and support issues, according to a survey released last year.
Addressing the World Economic Forum, held like every year in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, Gates explained, "we shall already make progress this year." Gates continued by explaining a few of the strategies that the software giant and antispam experts are working on.
The first line of research concerns authentication and identification for the sender of a piece of email, a concept close to an initiative recently announced by Yahoo! for "securing" email.
"Domain Keys", Yahoo!'s solution to spam, is the name of an open source software platform that the U.S. portal intends to release as soon as its central features will be fully developed.
The core idea is to create a sort of on-the-fly certification of email. An architecture will insert a secure private key in the header. The recipient system would then check whether the public key corresponds to the apparent sending domain, through the Internet's Domain Name System. If this check failed, the email message would be destroyed. If, on the other hand, the public and private keys checked, the message would be delivered normally.
Another strategy would get rid of automatic mechanisms used by industrial spammers: in order to ensure that an email is coming from a human being and not a spam-spewing machine, some sort of "quiz" or "puzzle" could be introduced. Only by solving it, an email would be considered "legitimate". This method is linked to the idea of making the management of outgoing email a more complex task: nothing would change for traditional users, while spammers sending out some million messages could be forced to employ costly powerful machines to handle their mass mailings.
Gates, who's been tackling spam for some time, thinks that the most promising way to curb spam would be the introduction of a sort of "spam tax". People sending out emails would take a "monetary risk": if recipients deem the message legitimate, the sender will pay nothing. If, on the other hand, the email is considered spam, the addressee could make the sender pay for it, through protocols integrated in the networks of the providers. Of course, this is a scenario requiring many changes to be implemented, including a perfectly secure management of email and a direct, ineludible link to a payment system.
While our mailboxes will be stuffed with Pizza Pizza specials, and in addition to spam faxes consuming a roll paper a day, we'll continue to receive electronic promises for enlarging this or that sexual organ. At least until 2006, says Gates.

Publication Date: 2004-02-08
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3608