Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WES) in Davos, Microsoft Boss Bill Gales promised that spam email will be stamped out in 2 years time. He stated that a three pronged attack would wipe out the spammers.
Current anti spamming tactics use filters that look for specific words in the email to detect if it might be spam.
Often this results in legitimate email being put into a quarantine folder. The user then needs to review the folder just to check that nothing has accidentally slipped through the net. Many companies have put solutions in place that return the email to the sender should this occur so that legitimate senders can reword and resend the email.
The filtering solutions are still being circumnavigated by the spammers. They are simply putting the text into pictures, using sensible subject headlines, adding random words, or changing the words slightly to get passed the filters.
In the long run filters would “not be the magic solution” said Gates.
One proposed technique currently being researched is the concept of “human challenges” forcing the computer sending the email to solve a puzzle or do a simple computation set by the receiving computer. This would slow the sending of email down insignificantly to legitimate user sending a normal quantity of email, but significantly slow down large computers sending millions a day. The hope would be that the cost to spammers of upgrading the multiple spam servers would render their trade unprofitable.
Another proposed technique would be to enforce payment by the sender of an email if the receiver returned the email as spam. This would deter spammers, but would be fine with real email users since they could be confident that their won email would be accepted.
It is estimated that around 60% of email sent is spam. Since the Can-Spam Act providers of spam blocking software say they are blocking more spam than ever.