Bill Gates Gets 4 Million Emails a Day

The next time you're sifting through the mortgage offers, cheap Rolex watches or dubious business proposals from Nigeria, spare a thought for Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder is the most spammed man in the world, with 4m emails arriving in his inbox each day.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, told a conference in Singapore that being the world's best-known software billionaire has its down side: "Bill receives 4m pieces of email per day, most of it spam."

The upside of the Microsoft founder's bulging inbox is that it appears to have focused his mind on the problem.

Spam is regarded as perhaps the biggest threat to the internet, with some experts putting it as high as 80% of the world's online traffic.

The company is working on a number of solutions, including software that replies automatically to email messages from users not known to that computer, and the idea of "postage" on emails. Microsoft is also working with internet firms AOL, Yahoo and EarthLink to verify the identity of the sender of an email message.

A North Carolina man who raked in $24m (£13m) from peddling junk products and pornography under a false name this month became the first felony conviction under under a United States anti-spam law, and faces up to nine years in prison.

Unlike ordinary people though, Mr Gates doesn't get a sore finger from deleting unwanted missives. The company has a team of people dedicated to ensuring he only gets mail that he wants to read.