In June 2003, the Microsoft chairman called for cooperation between government and corporations to fight the spammers. But Gates was branded hypocritical by anti-spam organizations because they said that Microsoft was only focusing on reducing the amount of spam received, rather than the spam sent by its users and servers.
John Cheney, chief executive of e-mail security firm BlackSpider Technologies, which conducted the survey, said the results show that the industry doesn't perceive Microsoft as a security authority, despite its chairman's enthusiasm for the task: "Spam isn't going to go away overnight and people don't think that Bill Gates is the right man to make it happen. It is going to take a combination of technology, legislation and a change in working practices," he said.
The survey also found that 38 percent of respondents didn't believe that the EU anti-spam directive would have any success in reducing unwanted e-mails. This is not a surprise because research has shown that the majority of spam comes from outside the EU and most countries have yet to implement the legislation.
Cheney said he was surprised that almost 40 percent of people thought the law, which bars unsolicited e-mails from being sent to only consumer e-mail addresses, would make a difference: "Spammers don't see any difference between a business e-mail addresses or a consumer e-mail addresses," he said.
Despite the apparent lack of confidence, progress is being made. On Thursday, four men became the first people to be charged under the Can-Spam Act, the U.S.'s much-criticized anti-spam legislation.
Additionally, service providers and technology companies have been working together with Microsoft during the past year to try and develop a universal Caller ID system for e-mail messages. At the RSA security conference in February, Hans-Peter Brondmo, co-chairman of anti-spam organization the E-mail Service Provider Coalition (ESPC)'s technology working group, said a small upgrade to the e-mail infrastructure would allow e-mails to "prove" their origin, making it much easier to identify "spoofed" messages.
"What we are talking about here is an upgrade to the e-mail infrastructure, but it is a minor upgrade. Caller ID/SPF simply means that when an IP address sends e-mail, you can ask if the domain it represents is legitimate. It uses the DNS infrastructure that is already there, so it links the sending domain with the sending IP address," he said.
