When the richest man in the world told that there will be no more spam in two years, a lot of people were skeptical, but said: hey, Gates did make our computer experience what it is today, who are we to argue? But it looks like the most famous geek was wrong. What did really happen with spam, and why it didn't stop?

Ohcash reminded me recently of the prophecy Bill Gates promised to come true two years from 2004. No more spam in 2006, the big man said, and was apparently wrong.

As Gates said, two things could have been implemented into our e-mail communication in order to eradicate spam. The first one was for people to prove they are in fact human when sending mail by solving a puzzle, the other one was that each and every e-mail sent could be marked as spam by the receiver and the sender would get a monetary fine.

Gates was wrong, but what exactly was the problem with his ideas? If you care for my two cents, I think that he (as so many computer oriented people) neglected the human factor.

If we all in reality have implemented the puzzle spam fighting techniques, the spammers would in my opinion adapt swiftly and outsource to developing countries to employ cheap labor, that is, real people who would know how to solve puzzles and be willing to do it hundreds of thousands of times a day.

The monetary method was not such a novelty but was in fact impossible to apply web-wide, for the simple fact that people would not be willing to pay to get their mail on the way. Because sooner or later someone somewhere would mark your mail as spam, even if it wasn't. And of course, if you had to pay for e-mail to get delivered, why the hack shouldn't we use snail mail instead?

The sad truth is that we, as a race, are a bit lazy, a bit stingy, a bit reckless, a bit willing to believe there in fact is easy money/remedy, and above all very curious, and that is the only reason why spam still gets sent and why so many people earn good money on it.

This translates into: a vast majority of computer users nowadays don't know squat about computers, software, internet, spam, viruses etc. They have no anti-virus, no firewall and no spam filters installed. They read every mail and click on every link they find interesting enough, because computers nowadays are not only cheap but also too easy to use.

(I often feel nostalgia for the good old days, when computers cost more and software was user unfriendly, and when you really had to read some literature in order to be able to use operating systems and surf the net.)

The solution to this problem of ours would be to sell every computer with the protective software installed and irremovable to say the least, but this brings us to another big problem: who would decide which programs get installed, what if educated users wanted to install some other protective tools, what if...

The spam problem remains unsolvable for now. But, if you can make an educated guess when it really will stop and how will it happen, feel free to leave a response.