Spam comes in all shapes and sizes, none of which are very well liked. I avoided original Spam like the plague as a child (it frightens me to this day), but electronic spam has created far more frustration and worry over the past few years than the mystery luncheon meat ever did. In a blog post taken from Read/WriteWeb today, Josh Catone writes:
“In 2001, spam accounted for an estimated 5% of our email. In 2007, it clogs our inboxes to the tune of 90-95% of all email sent…The year-over-year increase appears to indicate the failure of the US federal CAN-SPAM Act, which was passed in 2004 when spam only accounted for about 70% of all email sent.”
Catone is citing data from the spam filtering tech company Barracuda Networks. These figures are much more severe and telling than the tame statistics released by market researcher IDC recently, which were quoted in a USA Today article last month.
Unsolicited email messages creep (or pour, depending on your level of misfortune) into our inboxes on a daily basis, dodging filters in the form of MP3 files, e-cards, and PDF attachments. USA Today references Bill Gates’ bold statement in 2004 that in two years, the spam crisis would be resolved. Yet in 2007, a year after this problem was expected to be obsolete, electronic and human spammers are managing to send out 60 to 150 billion spam messages over the internet each day.
Even though IDC’s data is a little more reserved than Barracuda’s, it still conveys the behemoth nature of the spam problem. According to IDC, this is the first year that the total number of spam messages sent worldwide (10.8 trillion) will exceed the number of person-to-person emails sent out (10.5 trillion). The effect is that email accounts are first and foremost serving as a vehicle for spammers, which is an idea that no internet user or email account holder welcomes.
Email services often come with built-in defenses that block spam now, and security software is being enhanced to better protect against this growing problem. This forces spammers to be a little more creative in the way that they send messages. The growth of bots and compromised PCs that spew out spam in bulk has also fueled an increase in messages.
If you want some more background on the subject, the USA Today article includes a lot of information on the progression of spam over the past few years, as well as some interesting statistics on the different types of spam and the filtering technologies that are emerging to combat the messages. Also, here is an overview of Symantec’s seasonal spam report, which highlights some of the spam trends from this month and 2007 in its entirety.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 and is filed under Tech issues, The odd stuff.
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