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One Third of Email Now Spam
Himanshu writes "The volume of spam received by business has doubled over the last two years and it's going to get worse.
Analysts IDC reckons that spam represented 32 per cent of all email sent on an average day in North America in 2003, doubling from 2001. That figure is less than the 50 per cent or more junk mail statistic commonly cited by email-filtering firms like MessageLabs and Brightmail but it still represents a serious problem,"
From the logs of our anti-spam appliance, over the last six weeks or so:
That's right, about 96% of our email is spam, viruses, or otherwise ungood.I'd be delighted if the spam dropped off so it were only 32% of our mail. Think of all the things I could do with that extra bandwidth...
In fairness, the study says they were looking at businesses, and this is at a small ISP, mostly residential customers. But it's a good number to chew on nonetheless.
I heard about it here on /. and installed it the same day. At first it marked ALL my mail as spam because I'm on a few list servers, but the adaptive learning function of it is getting much better. After I "unlearned" my list mails as spam, it'd still let about 60% of spam through. Now it gets about 40 out of the 42 spams I get a day. I don't mind deleting two (or hitting "j" for junk), and recent searches through the junk folder show no false positives.
Check it out...
Stick a mail proxy between the internet and Exchange, that way he still gets to keep using Exchange, and you have a simple proxying machine that can do arbitary scanning and filtering.
You can scan all incoming mail with spamassissin and clamav before it reaches exchange, bounce or drop bad mail and forward "passed" mail into the Exchange server
You could also hookup a challenge response script there too.
I do the same thing for a company mail server running Lotus Notes.
Filtering is removing about 97% of the spam, but even after filtering, I'm getting more spam than real mail.
Most of the spam seems to be selling prescription drugs. It's clear the Bush Administration doesn't want to do anything about this; there's plenty of authority for stopping illegal sales of prescription drugs on-line. Prescription drugs are traceable, after all.
Why has nobody realised yet that it doesn't say 1/3 of email recieved is spam, but that 1/3 of email sent in the US is spam. I'm not suprised at that in the slightest - most spammers don't want to bother with the legal risks involved in sending spam inside the US. Just send it through some open relay wherever you find one or operate from Russia, it's far easier.