IHT: 'Bad guys' are winning in the fight against spam - EU wants action - by Brad Stone

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'Bad guys' are winning in the fight against spam - EU wants action - by Brad Stone

Three years ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, made an audacious prediction: The problem of unsolicited junk e-mail messages on the Internet would "be solved by 2006," he said.In the past six months, spam has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide, spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to the spam filtering firm Ironport, and unsolicited e-mail now accounts for more than nine of every 10 messages sent over the Internet. Responsible for much of the increase is a nettlesome new breed of junk message called image spam, in which the entire advertisement is presented inside a graphical illustration, eluding traditional text-reading spam detectors. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 percent to 45 percent of all junk e-mail messages.

Last week, the European Commission chastised member countries for doing too little to enforce European Union rules banning spam. The commission said that spam could account for as much as 80 percent of the content in a typical inbox in Europe, with the biggest culprit being the United States, which accounts for 21.6 percent of spam coming into the EU. The commission urged national regulators, governments and industry to work together more efficiently to combat the problem, and said that next year it would review whether new rules would be needed.