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

Logic?

[clang_jangle]

Less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. This means the main bulk of mails, 95%, is spam.

I don't doubt that it's around 95%, but the logic of the above-quoted statement is certainly flawed.

Re:Logic?

[Teun]

Survey only took place in Europe and apparently one company in the US.

In short, this is a waste of someone's money.

Only, huh?

27 nations and a population of >500 million forming the largest economic block in the world...

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.

Bill Gates

[Enderandrew]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/24/tech/main595595.shtml

Bill Gates promised in 2004 that spam would be completely solved within 2 years.

Re:Bill Gates

[feepness]

640 days ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:More than 90% for me too

[kandela]

Yeah, I know what you mean. Just last week I missed out on the opportunity to make a living just from surfing the web from my home computer! I can't tell you how disappointed I was that the email offering that 'chance of a lifetime' went to my spam folder.

Then there was the time I won a million dollars but because of my spam filter I never got to claim it in time. Or the time that the Prince of Nigeria sent a desperate email to me for help, but because of spam filtering I was never able to offer my assistance. I feel just terrible knowing that he was never able to access his fortune or reclaim his rightful seat on the throne.