In 2004 Microsoft founder (and honorary doctorate recipient) Bill Gates confidently stated that “Spam will soon be a thing of the past.” It’s now five years later (Gates suggested the problem would be solved in two), and spam is now 95% of all emails sent. Nonetheless, I think Gates was mostly right in principle even if the timeline was optimistic. A decade ago, when email spam was a real problem, I took care not to let my email address be displayed in public. Spammers had a habit of scraping email addresses from web-sites, with automated robots crawling the web looking…
In 2004 Microsoft founder (and honorary doctorate recipient) Bill Gates confidently stated that "Spam will soon be a thing of the past." It's now five years later (Gates suggested the problem would be solved in two), and spam is now 95% of all emails sent. Nonetheless, I think Gates was mostly right in principle even if the timeline was optimistic.
A decade ago, when email spam was a real problem, I took care not to let my email address be displayed in public. Spammers had a habit of scraping email addresses from web-sites, with automated robots crawling the web looking for any text containing the @-symbol. Despite my efforts, I had to abandon a couple of email addresses after they got added to the mailing lists traded between spammers, and the noise overwhelmed the signal in my inbox.
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