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Well if this "death to spam" program is as effective as Microsoft's "Trustworthy Computing" initiative, I suggest you don't hold your breath for you will surely suffocate.

While I must admire the thought, I fear that such announcements from Redmond may well be damaging to their credibility in the long-term. After all, have we really seen the promised shift away from features and focus on increased security yet?

It is interesting however, to note that Bill has bundled both spam and viruses into the one basket in his latest proclamation -- and he's done that for good reason.

Some of the solutions offered by Bill as a way of killing spam, such as using micropayments for those messages deemed to be spam by the recipient, rely on being able to track the true sender of the message.

Unless Microsoft really does (this time) bulk up the security of Windows, then spammers would remain untouchable -- "owning" other people's PCs and using them to send their spam through in an untraceable manner.

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Likewise, the suggestion that the sending of an email ought to involve some kind of non-trivial key calculation is also useless until the virus problem is sorted. Spammers need only write viruses that allow them to use thousands of innocent third party PCs to send their messages.

If it takes 10 seconds to perform the calculations to send an email, a network of (say) 1,000 "owned" PCs will still allow spammers to send 100 spams a second, 36,000 per hour, almost 100,000 per day. It might slow spam but it won't stop it.

The third suggestion offered by Bill, is that there's some kind of challenge/response system set up so that when email is received from an unknown recipient, a response is generated that requires that sender to perform some simple function not well suited to automation -- for example, describe a picture, count the circles but not the squares in an image, etc.

The problem with this approach is that it begins to cripple one of email's biggest advantages -- its simplicity and speed of use. And then there's always the risk that the automated response will get swallowed by one of the other spam-defeating measures already mentioned -- or just disappear into the ether.

So, I'd say to Bill, get your priorities sorted.

Beef up Windows and get rid of the security holes (we're still waiting for the URL bug to be sorted for goodness sake!)

Then, (once you've got a nice robust, secure platform) and only then will any of your other suggestions be worth pursuing.

Ultimately, I fear, the full and final solution to spam will be the introduction of micropayments levied on the sender of email, in conjunction with digital signatures to authenticate that sender. Even this however, won't work if spammers can "own" another person's PC :-(

Although we've all become used to sending email for free and the prospect of paying per message might sound outrageous right now -- think back to the early days of cars...

When cars were first introduced, there was no registration, no road-user tax or other levies. Of course, on the other hand, there were no sealed roads -- only rough dirt tracks that covered but a tiny portion of the country.

So, early motorists gave up their "free ride" in return for the numerous benefits that came from paying for the privilege of using a car.

This is exactly the way that email will go -- if we want to get rid of spam then we'll just have to accept that it will eventually become a mirror of the traditional postage system where we pay for the delivery of each and every message.

Sure, there will still be some spam -- just as some companies send junk mail through the post -- but you can guarantee that at least it will be of limited quantity and far more targeted. Hell, there might even be offers for something worth buying!

Not everyone will use a pay-per-message email system however -- and "free" alternatives will remain for those willing to put up with bucketloads of spam. Most people however, will ante-up the few dollars per month that it will cost to remain spam-free.

But who will run the pay-per-message email services?

Hmmm... perhaps now I see what Bill is up to.

Imagine if you earned just one cent for every time someone hit the send button. That is a serious wad of money -- and we all know that Bill has more than a passing interest in accumulating money. Of course, to be fair, he does also give away some goodly lumps of cash too.

But wait... perhaps Microsoft won't be the only player. Check out this domain registration.

Microsoft has recently announced that it's about to go hell-for-leather to unseat Google. Could it be that Redmond has caught wind of a Google plot to offer a pay-per-use spam-free email service of some kind?

Let's face it -- Google have already proven that they can produce systems with enormous processing power and bandwidth -- why not use the same type of system with a purpose-built email client to provide a global, spam-free email service to the world?

And if it came down to a battle between MicrosoftMail and GoogleMail, where would your spam-free dollars go?

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