Forty Percent of All Email is Spam

PCOL writes "There's an interesting article on spam in today's Washington Post which includes an inside look at AOL's spam control center in Northern Virginia. The story reports that roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the US is now spam, up from 8 percent in late 2001 and nearly doubling in the past six months; that AOL's spam filters now block 1 billion messages a day; and that spam will cost U.S. organizations more than $10 billion this year from lost productivity and the equipment, software and manpower needed to combat the problem."

Comments

sure, sure.

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

And 90% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Another stat

[techstar25]

Ironic. Forty percent of spam is pork.

40% ...?

[DaneelGiskard]

So who gets the 60% of the regular email I'm supposed to get?

Re:40% ...?

[scott1853]

It's deleted by the spam filters.

Re:Only 40%?

[scott1853]

Maybe you have lots of friends and they're all filling out those "notify my friends" forms?

in other news ...

[borgdows]

after renaming "french fries" Congress has just decided to rename "spam" as "french email" !

Re:Optimistic

[grylnsmn]

Oh yeah? Well I send over a million emails a day, and I'm lucky if 10 of them are legitimate!

Sturgeon's Law

[handy_vandal]

Forty percent? That's nothing. Sturgeon's Law states that ninety percent of everything is crap.

yep, we're all doomed

[gse]

One billion spam email a day, just through AOL. Gosh.

I figure I get about 425,000 a day myself at this point (er, give or take). It's at the point where it's getting painful to go through my SpamAssassin "caughtspam" folder. But there are still enough false positives (really, one is enough) that I can't send the whole thing to /dev/null.

Meanwhile, I'm accruing a great collection of classic spam subject lines. Some examples (all real):

• "I don't need your social security number yet"
• "this mom loves to stick hot dogs up her cooch"
• "Pill to Increase Your Ejaculation by 581%"
• "i am not perfect but i suck c0ck"
• "I got revenge by fucking! Here's proof :)"
• "Mission: To fuck as many mothers as I can!"
• "Fucking Machines! 13IN, .5HP, 350RPM"
• "Your slut wife boss need some action!"
• "#1 COLON CLEANSER! SEE PROOF"
• "Maybe your pets dream of intercourse with you"

Mmmm, society at its finest.

Terrorism!

[fredrikj]

$10 billion, that's a lot of money, and therefore an argument that George W. Bush might listen to. So, how about lobbying the US government into declaring spam "terrorist activity"? Just imagine the concept of special troops hunting down spammers, then locking them up without without a trial and throwing away the keys. Unless you bombed them off the face of the earth directly... In either case, we could even laugh our asses off while watching it live on TV!

Re:How much "real" mail is lost?

[dubl-u]

The problem with filters at the ISP/Mail Server is that one persons spam is anothers desired mail. How do correct for this?

Those few people can type "enlarge my penis" into Google and click on a link that comes up.

Re:Sounds about right to me

[Mr Guy]

Sysadmin for the comp sci department my college set up scripts to change any .vbs file sent as an attachment to, .vbs.ifyouclickonthisanditsreallyavirusIwillholdyo upersonallyresponsiblefordamagetotheschoolscompute rs The IT department for the school, running exchange servers, had to wait for microsoft to issue a patch. While the IT department got pounded with help requests, the comp sci had 0 virus reports. Wonder why...

Charge Spammers For Spell Checking

[kotku]

I just created a web site whose terms of service are that if you send an email to the email address listed then you will be charged for spell checking the email at £10 a character. Anybody want to advise on what my chances of collecting are ?