] SINGAPORE (Reuters) - E-mail users inundated with
] unsolicited "spam" messages have reason to hope Microsoft
] Corp. will develop better tools for tackling the problem:
] Bill Gates is suffering more than anyone.
]
] Gates, Microsoft's chairman, gets 4 million e-mails a day
] and is probably the most "spammed" person in the world,
] his Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said Thursday.
]
] However, only a few junk e-mails get through to Gates's
] inbox thanks to anti-spam technology that filters his
] messages, Ballmer said at a Microsoft (Research) event in
] Singapore.

This sounds like bullshit. Maybe bgates@microsoft.com or wahtever gets 4,000,000 emails, but I highly doubt they are running spam filters against all of that. In fact, I'm sure most mail tohis publically available email addresses that isn't from microsoft.com addresses goes to /dev/null (or the sucky Windows equivalent, the recycle bin).

I mean think about it. Lets assume he gets 200 emails that are real emails (10hr workday means 20 an hour, which means 3 minutes an email, if he does nothing but read email. 200 seems like a good estimate). 200/4,000,000 is .005%. Five. Thousandths. of a percent. Contrast that with consider the false-positive rate of most spam filters. Depending on the settings, some important mail is getting lost, or a hell of a lot of spam gets through.

Now granted, alot of the spam will be duplicate, which the filters will grab easily. Imagine, there is a cluster of windows machines (can windows even cluster?) that do nothing but spam filter Gates email. He might as well pay an intern to manually sort it after some basic filtering is done.

Gates gets 4 million emails, A Day!