Spam

Three years ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, made an audacious prediction: The problem of unsolicited junk e-mail messages on the Internet would "be solved by 2006," he said. Mehran Sabbaghian scoffs at that forecast. Sabbaghian, the network engineer at the Web-hosting company Lanset America, said that a sudden Internetwide increase in spam last month clogged his company's servers so badly that delivery of regular e-mail messages to customers was delayed by hours. To relieve the pressure, Lanset, based in Sacramento, California, took the drastic step of blocking all messages from overseas, where much of the spam was originating. This week, Lanset plans to start accepting incoming mail from foreign countries again, but Sabbaghian said that the problem of junk e-mail messages was "now out of control." Spam is back — in our inboxes and on everyone's minds. In the past six months, spam has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide, spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to the spam-filtering company Ironport, and unsolicited e-mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 messages sent over the Internet. Read the rest here.