microsoft's gates is world's most 'spammed' person, page-3

  1. 5,822 Posts.
    Hmmm ... found this today ...

    Vexed Gates gets 4 million e-mails a day
    By MARK HUME
    From Friday's Globe

    You may have lost track of how much spam you get in a day, but Bill Gates is keeping count of what's happening in his e-mail basket.

    And he doesn't like it.

    Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp.'s chief executive officer, said recently at a conference in Singapore that Mr. Gates is getting carpet bombed with spam. “Bill receives four million pieces of e-mail per day, most of it spam.”

    In most offices, including Prime Minister Paul Martin's, spam is filtered out. But so much is coming in that it's jamming up systems, causing even software moguls like Mr. Gates to take notice.

    Melanie Gruer, a spokeswoman for Mr. Martin, seemed unconcerned yesterday, saying the PMO doesn't count the junk e-mails it receives because they're filtered out.

    “He receives between 100 to 500 [messages] a day, depending on the day,” she said. Using the most modest industry estimates, which indicate at least 50 per cent of e-mails are spam, that would mean he gets between 200 and 1,000 junk messages a day.

    That's a long way from Mr. Gates.

    MessageLabs, a leading spam-fighting company, says that of more than 1.45 billion e-mails scanned worldwide in September, more than 1.05 billion were stopped as spam. That means more than 72 per cent were junk.

    Ferris Research, a consulting firm based in San Francisco, estimates that junk e-mail cost corporations in the United States more than $10-billion (U.S.) last year.

    Mr. Ballmer said Microsoft is working on solutions, including exploring the idea of “postage” on e-mails that would make mass messaging costs prohibitive and automatically replying to e-mails from unknown senders.

    But spammers are constantly finding ways to get around efforts to block their messages, which are sent out in the millions.

    Fighting spam is also big business.

    ActiveState Corp., a Vancouver company, was recently bought by British-based Sophos PLC for $32-million, because of its leading spam-fighting technology.

    ActiveState provides anti-spam software to more than 80 of the world's largest educational institutions, including Duke University, Stanford, Texas A&M and the University of California at Berkeley.

    It boasts that its PureMessage software can identify and quarantine more than 98 per cent of spam. At Stanford, which has 22,000 e-mail user accounts, the system processes about 500,000 messages a day. That's a big inbox next to Mr. Martin's, but Mr. Gates is getting eight times that all by himself.

    Richi Jennings, lead analyst on spam for Ferris Research, says lots of corporate heads get junk e-mails, but Mr. Gates is probably in a league of his own. “Gates is a special case. His e-mail address is very, very widely posted around the Internet, and has been for a very long time.”
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    Cheers ... tight stops.


    This is only my view ... read the red stuff.
 
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