Yes, Bill Gates gets spam, just like everyone else. The difference between him and everyone else is that he can do something about it -- really. If you roam around www.microsoft.com/spam, you'll find a war chest of information on the subject -- backgrounders, press releases, primers on anti-spam technologies. There's even a personal update from Gates himself, written last June. "It's still a major problem," he tells us.

That inauspicious revelation aside, the maker of the world's most widely used in-boxes -- think Hotmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Exchange, MSN, and Entourage -- has indeed proclaimed all-out war on the electronic scourge on productivity. Leading the offensive is a little-known cadre of some 50 spam fighters, the first of whom came out of Microsoft's research lab in March 2003. This Safety, Tech­nology, and Strategy group has since helped bring lawsuits against some 100 spammers, and Microsoft claims that the e-mail-filtering technology the group has developed blocks several billion spam messages daily. Now Gates and company are beginning to deploy two new tech­nolo­gies that target the servers and e-mail programs of spammers themselves. "This pushes the battle to fight spam all the way out to the point e-mail is sent," says George Webb, business manager of the spam-busting team.