Jupiter Forecasts 50% Increase In Spam

Mr. Sketch writes "According to Yahoo, the amount of spam is expected to increase 50% in the next five years, meaning the average american will get over 3600 of them a year. The future of email is??"

Comments

Bright future for Open Source E-mail clients

[NKJensen]

'cause they include clever spam filters.

I'm trying out POPfile (Naive Bayes text classifier and a POP3 proxy) these days, it's looking good so far.

Re:Bright future for Open Source E-mail clients

[CanadaDave]

I've been trying out the Mozilla nightly builds which have the Mozilla spam filtering features in them. It works great so far. I can't until it is release-ready. I'm hoping for 1.3, but I think that's little optimistic.

A modest idea...

[still_sick]

The problem currently is that there's so many people who are doing a very good job at blocking / stopping most of the spam that the average joe or public official doesn't realize just how much spam is sent to his mailbox every day (or at least would be if it weren't for the anti-spammers).

What if for a period of time, maybe a week or a month, a day isn't long enough, the anti-spammers just quit. All of them. Let the spammers have an internet-wide orgy. Let people see how much of a problem this is - let the lawmakers make better spam laws, and then have the law enforcement stop them.

Blocking the spam is counter-productive, it only encourages the spammers to come up with better ideas on how to get it into your mailbox. The spam needs to be stopped at the source.

No chance

[Matts]

There's no way in hell we're going to be that lucky. A 50% increase in 5 years would make me jump with joy.

The truth is it's increasing at a much faster rate than that. Recent research has shown that it's going up about 400% per year!!! And my personal email account verifies that sort of increase.

I suspect Jupiter is going to be eating its own words. In 5 years I suspect we'll be seeing perhaps 50 times more spam, not 50% more.

Re:Could we all just stop spreading gloom and FUD?

[hkmwbz]

You said it yourself: Spam makes your Hotmail account unusable. That is why people complain. Spam takes up network resources and disk space. it wastes people's time. It sometimes makes an e-mail account unusuable - especially if you don't have the time to set up filtering etc.

People shouldn't have to spend their time dealing with spam. Why should I have to? Why should I have to get multiple e-mail addresses because of spam? Why should my employer have to spend lots of money and resources on fighting spam, when it could have been spent elsewhere to improve performance rather than trying to prevent performance from deteriorating because of spam?

How does spam cripple e-mail communication, you ask? Again, you said it yourself. People have to start hiding their e-mail address. It will be harder to find a contact address to get in touch with them.

You are talking about spreading FUD. At the same time, you kind of contradict yourself by showing that yes, e-mail addresses can become unusable because of spam and yes, spam can cripple e-mail communication.

So where's the FUD? Spam is a serious problem to many, and you, as someone else I responded to, don't seem to understand this. You only seem to be able to see it from your own point of view. Maybe spam doesn't bother you. Well, I can inform you that it does bother me, my friends and my employer. A lot. It costs us money. It costs us time. This is not "gloom and FUD", it is reality.