Some good news from the airy summits of Davos: 'Spam,' Bill Gates told the World Economic Forum, 'will be solved within two years.' Great! The problem will be fixed by the creation of a challenge-and-response system to slow down, then block, and finally - and this is the killer - charge money for unauthenticated emails. At the moment, an email can be from anybody: you can fill in the 'from' section of an email to claim that it is from anyone in the world, up to and including billg@microsoft.com. (This is one reason why it is a bad idea to bounce spam back to the sender - the sender is quite likely not to have sent it.) Those fake emails are free to send. So the two-step solution to spam is, first, to make sure that it is from whom it says it is from, and then to stop making it free to send in anonymous bulk. This will make spamming uneconomic, and presto, email will go back to being as straightforwardly useful as it once was.

LRB 25 January 2007 | PDF Download