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

Another stat

[techstar25]

Ironic. Forty percent of spam is pork.

Optimistic

[Rosonowski]

I think this is a bit optimistic. I get 300 peices of email a day, and I'm lucky if more then 50 are legitimate mail.

Re:Optimistic

[grylnsmn]

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

Re:Optimistic

[kring]

I run a small site (~100 users) and our spam filter, which is designed to be relatively forgiving, catches about 35% of the total messages that are handled by our mail server. 40% seems pretty low to me.

Sounds about right to me

[utmslave]

I administer a Spam filter for a state University in Tennessee. Since I began filtering, I have trapped about 42% of all email bound for faculty and staff. Some spam still gets through, but the impact on our pop and imap servers has been greatly reduced.

550 Spammer Go Away!

Take this with a grain of salt

[mrhandstand]

The srticle states that 40% of Internet traffic is Spam. And where does this statistic comec from? From Brightmail...a vendor of anti-spam software. Remember...liars, damn liars, and statisticians

Re:40% ...?

[scott1853]

It's deleted by the spam filters.

Losing a figurative war on spam

[Nonac]

Aside from the AOL spam control center, most of the spam prevention discussed in this email is aimed at trying to stop the sender through legislation and black lists. Legislation will never work, and black lists are marginal.

The answer to this shortcoming in the current email infrastructure is redesigning email protocols to allow spam to be stopped as it is sent.

I don't have the answer, but something that forces the sender to verify that the recipient will accept the message before it is relayed will be a start. I also like the idea that came from Microsoft recently of forcing the sender to pay the recipient a small amount of money.

The problem with bayesian filters is that they filter too much spam. The more people that use bayesian filters, the more messages the spammers will have to send to get through. Because it is almost free to send messages, they will continue to increase the number of messages they send until it gets to a point that email infrastructure can't handle it anymore.

Technological solutions will be easiest

[Ed Avis]

The real problem with spam is the economics: it costs next to nothing to send a message, the only real cost (time) is borne by the recipient. Fix that problem and spam will go away. It doesn't need legislation, which in any case could apply in just one jurisdiction.

A system like Hash Cash could solve the problem. The most popular free mail clients could start including hash-cash postage with each sent message, and then in a couple of years' time start to drop incoming messages that don't have postage paid. AOL could include hash cash in their mail client easily. *Easily*. That spam-detection centre they run is not cheap. Even Microsoft would add hash cash to Outlook, Outlook Express and Hotmail, since it's another encouragement to upgrade to a new Outlook release (which of course requires a new Windows version).

Getting the whole world to upgrade its mail clients is a hard task, but getting every government in the world to pass anti-spam laws and enforce them is much harder. Goodness knows it's bad enough trying to get _one_ legislature to take a sane view on anything technology-related.

isn't it ironic???

[Botchka]

that the biggest purveyor of filling my postal mail box with crap that I haven't signed up for or asked for (ie: cd's and cd holders that are worthless), is now fighting spam. Give me a break! How about they stop mailing those stupid #@%@$%^& cd's and filling the landfills with garbage that doesn't degrade. They are hypocrites!

Spammunition

[BlackjackGuy]

My spam problems have almost entirely gone away since installing Spammunition. It's a bayesian filter for MS Outlook. Wish I didn't have to use MS Outlook but it's a requirement at work.

Bayesian filters are definitely the way to go. They flat-out *work*. Other programs I've used just didn't perform, like Cloudmark Spamnet.

Go after the businesses who pay spammers

[kalislashdot]

You know it's a funny thing because businesses like and hate spam. They like it because it brings in money and they hate it because they have to spend money on spam filters and lost work time.

Here is a possible solution. Spammers cover their tracks. Well instead of trying to go after spammers go after the business that use them. Those businesses MUST be traceable because they include ways to buy their product. If we must make a law, which would only work in the US, it should say "You can't hire a spammer to send your mail". Then when www.pacificmeds.com sends me a spam for "save money on prescription drugs" they can be fined.

Go after the source, not the person who fills the need. Once the need is squashed by the law spam will reduce greatly.

in other news ...

[borgdows]

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

40 percent by number or by size ?

[LMCBoy]

According to POPFile only 18% of my email messages are spam, but it's 46% when you take the file sizes into account. The total memory fraction would seem to be a more relevant measurement if you're an ISP concerned about spam's costs.

So, when they say 40%, is that by number of messages or total size?

Sturgeon's Law

[handy_vandal]

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

White list with pass code

[Continental Drift]

My Eudora filters allow me to auto-reply to mail coming from someone not already in my address book. The auto-reply tells the writer to try again and put a code word in the subject line, which the filters will then bypass. This is very effective, and since I implemented it, I don't see spam. It is a bit of a pain for people writing to me the first time.

Now, a white list like this can be bypassed by a spammer claiming to be a friend of mine. It can't claim to be me, because my filters automatically delete anything sent to my address claiming to come from me. I'm wondering if anyone else who has implemented a white list for themselves has seen any problems with it.

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.

40% is an understatement

[Burdell]

I just installed an upgraded spam filter server at the ISP I work for, and we are now filtering out almost 70% of inbound mail as spam (with basically zero false positive complaints). We combine Brightmail with the three main MAPS lists (RBL, DUL, and RSS), as well as the basic DNS based checks (for valid domains, etc.) built into the mail server, with Brightmail catching the most by far.

You can see our mail stats here.

Re:now i get spam

[You're All Wrong]

Nice innit?

However did you notice in the article it said:
"nearly doubling in the past six months, according to Brightmail Inc., a major vendor of anti-spam software."

So I'm not 100% sure the stats can be believed - it's in their interest to tell you it's all doom and gloom. It's even in their interest to have you spammed, but that of course would be conspiracy theory central...

YAW.

Re:Accuracy

[corbettw]

Umm, what AOL is doing is right and proper. Is your host the MX record for a domain? No? Then noone should be accepting mail from it. Can your host be authenticated with reverse IP look-ups, crosschecked with MX? No? Then, again, noone should be getting your mail. (All except your own ISP, that is.)

This might be inconvient for you, but this system exists as a deterent to spammers. Don't like it? Get your own IP addresses for home use or host your own domain somewhere (that's what I do).