Tag

Bill Gates

Spam is Dead. Long Live Spam!

Spam is Dead.  Long Live Spam! As pointed out in The Register yesterday (and picked up by Whit in his feed), it’s now been exactly two years since Bill Gates declared that Microsoft would eliminate spam in two years. Hmmm.  Let’s think about that.  Filters do keep getting better, which Gates predicted.  But challenge/response filtering seems to be dead in the water, and the notion that we’re all going to pay for email stamps seems to be toast as well. So where are we?  Spam is certainly more of a nuisance than a true crisis these days, which is even more true than when I wrote about here 15 months ago.  But it still consumes massive amounts of time, bandwidth,…

The Rumors of Email’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

I’d like to think that Mark Twain would wholeheartedly approve of me paraphrasing his famous quote for this purpose, but I’m getting a little tired of all these reports about how email is dead. The latest one comes in the form of an op-ed in Computerworld this week. This will be a longer post than usual — my apologies in advance. The writer talks about how email will die soon because there are too many issues with viruses, spam, IT management costs, and employment practices. The writer says email is close to having a bigger downside than upside, and that email will go the way of the typewriter or the floppy disk drive. I say that this is a writer…