I haven’t thought about spam for years.I mean, I know it’s there, in comment sections, and swept deftly under the rug of its eponymous folder in my email account. But I haven’t heard from any desperate relatives, passports lost on a trip to paris, in more than a year. And don’t think I’ve had a single ad for Viagra, real or fake, hit my inbox in recent memory. As far as I’m concerned, spam is a non-issue.“Spam will be a thing of the past,” Bill Gates declared in 2004 before the World Economic Forum. Even as he praised Google and admitted to Microsoft’s missteps in search, Gates wielded his trump card like a tech boss: Microsoft would have the problem licked in two years, relying on basic word puzzles — either human, or cycle-eating computational ones — and what essentially mounted to stamps. Basically, the idea was that if you marked something as spam, the sender would get dinged at a predetermined rate. Email would be free for users, but abusers would end up paying for the infrastructure costs they incurred, as if they were relying on the Postal Service. Filtering, said Gates, would “not be the magic solution.”The stamp idea was shelved almost immediately, and while CAPTCHAs have taken off as a great way to slow down automatic signups, they never got implemented inside the inbox. I take that back — Gmail’s Goggles make you solve a math problem before sending an email, in order to prevent the regret that comes after the influence of alcohol. I had it going for a week in an attempt to shore up my arithmetic.But Gates’s biggest miscalculation was the filtering one. He couldn’t predict the rise of Google’s killer e-mail app either. (He did praise the “high level of IQ” at Google’s research team, but promised, “we will catch them.”) In fact, thanks to Google, filtering has developed much faster than many had predicted.A Google PR rep explained that well under 1 percent of messages coming into your account are marked as spam — but those messages, the ones that end up in your spam folder, are only the missed spam. More than 50 percent of emails to the system never make it anywhere near your inbox.And so, in a way, Bill Gates wasn’t so wrong after all. Email spam really is pretty much gone.Read the rest over at Motherboard.
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