Spam Volume Jumps 35% In November

gregleimbeck writes "Spam volume soared another 35% in November, an e-mail security vendor said Thursday, and the month saw spam tactics that reduced the efficiency of traditional anti-spam filters. 'There's been a huge increase in spam volume,' says David Mayer, a product manager at IronPort Systems, 'from 31 billion spams a day on average in October 2005 to 63 billion in October 2006. But in November, we saw two surges that averaged 85 billion messages a day, one from Nov. 13 to 22, the other from Nov. 26 to 28.'"

Comments

I'd say more than 35%

[twiggy]

Maybe it's just me, but my spam volume seems to have jumped at least 200% in recent months.

Are we finally going to reach a point where only trusted addresses can email us? Seems the arms race is being severely lost. I've got a pretty good spamassassin config and I can't keep up anymore, I find myself having to manually delete literally hundreds of messages a day now.

Re:I'd say more than 35%

[heinousjay]

That's because you've been trained by Hollywood and Slashdot and all the other happy lefty bullshitters to believe anyone in business must be a liar and a thief. It's a generalization that isn't even close to true, but that doesn't stop it from being propagated in the name of populism. Unfortunately, the idea of the noble poor is just as much a myth.

Everyone has equal potential to be scum. It's just easier to make people hate successful scum.

Why do we fight this at the end?

[cliffski]

I use (amongst other thing) spamhilator. It's free, and its pretty reliable. The trouble I have is that I *have* to allow everyone to mail me. When you run a business, you *do* occasionally get people guessing your email address from your domain and sending you a potentially vital email. I just can't afford to block emails by default. And anything (like captchas or auto-response systems) that makes it hard for my customers to contact me is just BAD.

I don't see why we are always fighting this problem at the reception end, rather than the source. Spam filters can work quite well, but why are they mostly applied right at the very endpoint of the chain?
I'd be very happy for some basic filtering to take place on my outgoing mail at the ISP level. If it meant the odd automatic email with a captcha saying "are you sure you intended to send this mail?" before a spammy-looking email went out, thats fine with me, and wouldn't that approach cut down on all those twits whose PC's are part of a botnet without them realising it?

Bah, why is firefox suddenly getting me to spell check in American?

Who reads it?

[Kelson]

Is there anyone out there who seriously READs this garbage and actually considers sending money to these people?

The great irony of the spam arms race is that the better we get at filtering the spam, the more garbage the spammers send out just to get the same return. You can't stop filtering it, because the mail you want would be buried in a torrent of spam. But filtering more just raises the bar for the next round of spam.

Eventually it may get to the point where (a) email is unusable or (b) spammers have to send such a massive volume of cr@p that it no longer becomes a cheap business, and it ceases to be worth spamming. Until then, things will keep escalating.