Gates vows to have spam swallowed in two years

Microsoft chief Bill Gates has vowed to make spam emails obsolete in two years’ time, sources confirmed tonight.

Mr Gates admitted spamming, which often relates to pornography, pyramid schemes or financial scams, was innovative.

But, he revealed that Microsoft was investigating three solutions to rid in-boxes from the clutter of unsolicited bulk emails.

He was speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF), in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos, yesterday.

Filters could be used to sift real mail from spam but would not be the “magic solution” as spammers used random words in subject headers and replaced text with pictures to go undetected.

“Human challenges”, forcing the sender to solve a puzzle or the computer sending the email to do a simple computation, would be easy for a machine sending a few emails, but expensive and difficult when dealing with lots of spam.

The ultimate solution would be to make senders of email pay a fee if their mail was rejected as spam.

“Payment at risk”, the electronic equivalent of a stamp, would not deter genuine e-mailers who would be confident their mail would be accepted.

Common techniques used by spammers include forged sender names, false subject lines, fake server names, inaccurate and misrepresented sender addresses, or obscured transmission paths.

About 70% comes from virus-infected machines which install miniature mail and web servers on home PCs belonging to innocent third parties.

Research has showed that an estimated 40% of all e-mails sent worldwide are junk.

According to the Spamhaus Project, a non-profit organisation that names and shames spammers on the Internet, the top 10 originators of spam are:

1. United States

2 China

3 South Korea

4 Brazil

5 Argentina

6 Canada

7 Taiwan

8 Russia

9 Italy

10 United Kingdom