By Latest Count, 95% of Email Is Spam

An anonymous reader writes "The European Network and Information Security Agency released its new spam report, which looks at spam budgets, the impact of spam and spam management. Less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. This means the main bulk of mails, 95%, is spam. This is a very minor change, from 6%, in earlier ENISA reports. Over 25% of respondents had spam accounting for more than 10% of help desk calls. The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, and received replies from 100 respondents from 30 different countries."

Comments

I'm surprised it's that low

[jimicus]

I was seeing more like 97% (once you excluded system generated internal emails - CVS and Bugzilla between them can generate a fair bit of mail).

The killer for running our own mail system in its entirety was when I did the arithmetic and our co-hosted secondary mail server was costing more than buying Google for Domains. That's before you even consider the document management Google for domains offers, which was just icing on the cake.

Re:Accounting for help desk calls?!

[NatasRevol]

Your grandmother is smarter than most people in the office.

I too was the email guru once upon a time (last year). It boggled my mind that people simply could not understand that some email was spam, and that some valid mail got caught because their friends forwarded a forward or an ad company sent them an actual email. And I explained this to the same set of people over and over again.

Re:might be a good thing

[Joce640k]

Doesn't matter. There's no shortage of people who believe spamming will make them rich. Spam isn't going to go away just because it doesn't work.