In the latest of his periodic e-mail messages to Microsoft Corp. customers, Bill Gates on Tuesday said the amount of spam clogging corporate networks and users' inboxes is "ridiculous" and detailed the company's plans to help stop the onslaught.
Microsoft recently established a new internal group, the Anti-Spam Technology and Strategy Group, dedicated to finding ways to stop spam from reaching customers. Among the technologies the group is pursuing is a better filter that can adapt to users' preferences and create an anti-spam system unique to each person. A version of this filter will be included in Outlook 2003, and Exchange 2003 has an API for better integration with third-party spam filters.
In his e-mail, titled "Toward a Spam-Free Future," Gates portrays the company's anti-spam effort as part of its larger Trustworthy Computing initiative, saying that "although there's no easy solution, we believe that spam can and must be dramatically reduced."
Gates, chairman and chief software architect at Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., writes that spam represents a major threat to the productivity gains companies have made in the last decade through the use of e-mail.
News source: eWeek
