Bill G.'s 'anti-spam dept.'

Catching up on my reading today, I noticed some odd details in the press coverage of Steve Ballmer's recent comments about the huge volume of spam received by Bill Gates.

For example, this story by the Associated Press, citing Ballmer, reported that there is "practically an entire department at the company" dedicated to ensuring that nothing unwanted gets into Gates' inbox. The story added later, "Ballmer said Microsoft has special technology that just filters spam intended for Gates." And an alternate version of the story noted that "several Microsoft employees are dedicated to ensuring that nothing unwanted gets into [Gates'] inbox."

Other reports came to similar conclusions. But thinking about it today, the whole thing struck me as more than a little odd. Would the company really designate "practically an entire department" -- or even several people -- and create special filtering technology, all for the single purpose of filtering one person's e-mail? Sure, that person is Bill Gates, and as we all now know, he receives 4 million messages a day, but still, it seems absurd. As Adam Engst observed, "I'm sure it's effective in the end, but come on, why not install some real spam-filtering technology that doesn't require, as Ballmer puts it, 'a whole department almost' to clean up after it." (Link via Brian Chin)

At the very least, it's the type of resource-allocation issue that would generate some outrage from the Mini-Microsoft blogger, the anonymous advocate of slimming the company down.

If only it were true. I went back and looked at a Microsoft transcript of Ballmer's Singapore speech, which I had asked for when the stories about Ballmer's comments originally came out. Here's the section on which the conclusions were apparently based:

"At Microsoft I use Outlook. There are two people who I think probably are the number one spam recipients in the world: Bill Gates, because he is Bill Gates, and Bill literally receives about 4 million pieces of e-mail per day. (Laughter.) Most of it spam. And so we have special technology which just filters. I mean, literally there's a whole department almost that takes care of that. (Laughter.)"

As we've noted in the past, Ballmer's speaking style sometimes leaves things open to interpretation. This was the same speech where the initial coverage of Ballmer's Linux comments stirred a controversy. (For an additional example of this type of thing from a separate appearance, see the recent "iPod users are thieves" controversy, and clarifying coverage.)

Looking at his spam comments, it wasn't completely clear whether Ballmer really meant to say that the company had created special technology and established almost a full department solely to deal with Gates' e-mail. From the context, I can see where someone might reach that conclusion. But note that he said, "And so we have special technology which just filters." He didn't say, "And so we have special technology which just filters Bill's e-mail."

So I touched base this morning with a Microsoft spokesman, Sean Sundwall, who explained that Ballmer was actually referring to the broader anti-spam group at the company, which includes dozens of people working on existing and future anti-spam technologies in general. It isn't a department set up solely for sifting through Gates' e-mail. Likewise, Sundwall noted that the filtering system used on Gates' inbox is the same SmartScreen technology used by others at the company. Microsoft introduced the initial version of SmartScreen for Outlook, Hotmail and MSN e-mail last year.

Posted by Todd Bishop at November 29, 2004 12:55 PM