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,"

Comments

Bah.

[Kenja]

I've had the same domain name for around ten years with a catch all email acount. 1 in 3 is nothing, for me its closer to 99 out of 100.

Thank goodness for filters, BUT...

[Not_Wiggins]

Filtering doesn't mitigate the problem.

So what if I don't have to see the mail? That doesn't mean my mailserver isn't using cycles to talk to some originating server, transfer, store and eventually delete that spam. The only saving grace is I don't have to pay for bandwidth on a usage basis (cable modem is still, happily, "flat rate").

But what happens if that volume gets to be high enough that it starts to affect my ability to use the bandwidth for other things?

What we have available are basically work-arounds; we need a concrete solution that addresses the basic problem.

So what is the problem? People soliciting without you opting in? Deceitful mail designed to make you open it thinking it is from a friend? The sheer volume?

The real problem is we haven't found an effective way to trace this crap back to the people supposedly "making money" with these schemes.

Solve *that* issue... put a name, address, and bank account to that spam, and we'll clean this stuff up in a hurry!

Re:I get tons. 1 in 3 ha!

[spellraiser]

Note that the analysis says that 1/3 of all email sent is spam. This can easily be coincide with many users receiving lots more spam than this.

For instance, there might be many users which receive a larger slice of the other, legitimate 2/3, thus making up for those who receive less of it.