Microsoft: Spam can be contained within two years

IDG News Service - Unwanted commercial e-mail, better known as spam, can be contained within two years but will first reach unprecedented proportions, Microsoft Corp.'s chief spam fighter said yesterday.
"Spam has reached epic proportions, and we are in a crisis situation," said Ryan Hamlin, general manager of Microsoft's antispam technology and strategy group, speaking at the company's Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View, Calif.
"For a lot of people out there, the situation has gotten so bad that they are willing to give up e-mail if the spam situation does not get better," he said. Almost half of all e-mail today is spam, according to Hamlin, citing figures from Brightmail Inc.
And it's about to get worse.
The amount of spam is still growing, and Hamlin predicts that as much as 65% of total e-mail next year could be spam. The cost to U.S. businesses to combat spam will double from the $9 billion spent in 2002, he predicted.
"It won't surprise me at all if we spend close to $18 billion a year next year to deal with spam," he said. This cost includes the price of filtering software and storage hardware. Loss of productivity isn't factored in, Hamlin said.
Microsoft, together with industry partners and even traditional rivals such as America Online Inc., is working to eliminate spam (see story). The topic has also drawn the interest of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and U.S. lawmakers, who appear ready to pass antispam legislation this year.
These efforts should halt the growth in spam that lands in users' in-boxes and within 18 months could even reduce it, Hamlin said. Within two years, he said, spam could be contained and reduced to the level of a mere nuisance, becoming like some computer viruses: something that is out there but that a user isn't often affected by.
"An occasional spam might show up, but it is kind of noise, and you will just delete it. Spam [fighting] will evolve into a measure/countermeasure cycle similar to the antivirus landscape," he said.