Spam Hits 95% of All Email

An anonymous reader writes "Commtouch released its Email Threats Trend Report based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly. The report examines the appearance of new kinds of attachment spamsuch as PDF spam and Excel spam together with the decline of image spam, as well as the growing threat of innocent appearing spam containing links to malicious web sites. Image spam declined to a level of less than 5% of all spam, down from 30% in the first quarter of 2007; also, image pump-and-dump spam has all but disappeared, with pornographic images taking its place."

Comments

call me a cynic, but

[petes_PoV]

... here's a report from a company that specialises in anti-virus and other security products.

While I'm not denying spam etc. is an annoyance and does cause a lot of people some problems, do we really want to accept at face value some words from an organisation that could well have a vested interest in making the problem appear more threatening than it really is?

Personally I'd prefer to teach people how to avoid spam/virus infection - in the same way we teach people how to avoid clinical infection, than to go around wailing about how bad the problem is.

Re:call me a cynic, but

[gammygator]

FWIW, about 90% of our e-mail has been spam... and we've seen a solid 50% increase in traffic over the past quarter. The numbers aren't that out of whack. quote: Personally I'd prefer to teach people how to avoid spam/virus infection... Good luck with that. Particularly with the avoiding spam part. If you come up with a foolproof method that actually involves using e-mail... I'm sure you'll be a lot richer than I am.

Re:white lists are the way to go

[tepples]

And really - if I want to hear from you then you'll be on that list. If you aren't on that list then I don't want you cluttering up my inbox in the first place. Let me guess: You don't run a business.

Any different?

[Gorkamecha]

Is this any different then the stats of the dead tree style of spam that appears in my mailbox every day?
And we have seen the huge (cough) progress made in removing that snail mail spam from the system.

Honestly, there seems to have been more progress in weeding out the digital spam then the paper sort.
Even vague sort of laws and protections and such.

Re:SPAM @ 95%?!

[jfengel]

They're good, but they're not that good for me. I get several spams a day in my inbox (and thousands a day filtered out).

Bizarrely, they should be easy to identify. Most of them are in Russian. Whatever bayesian network they're doing should have figured out by now that I don't read Russian.

The other one is the same template, over and over, all beginning with the same phrase. I have no idea why that one keeps getting through.

I'm sure not complaining; they're clearly filtering out a huge amount of sheer misery.