Journalism Research and Random Meanderings

Friday, November 19, 2004

You think you have spam problems? 

"[Microsoft] Chairman Bill Gates gets up to 4 million e-mails a day and most of them are spam, one of his associates says."

In Technology News: Security: Bill Gates Inundated with Spam: "Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in Singapore the 4 million e-mails are really just a fraction of what's sent to his boss, since he has an entire department charged with filtering out the junk, the BBC reported Thursday."

These people have too much time on their hands. I suppose it's not too much trouble to add Balmer's and Gates' e-mail addresses to an address list but it's an exercise in futility. Does anyone think for a minute that Gates et al would actually succumb to the faint urge to see if those penis enlargement ads are for real? That's assuming of course that spammers have normal thought processes.

How rewarding is this? Somebody works their way through college or university and gets a job with Microsoft only to find out their job is checking that Bill Gates' spam filters are working and swimming through an endless list of messages to see if a real message got filtered out. I wonder what the turnover rate is in that department?

PB