87% of e-mail traffic is spam

InformationWeek reports that spam accounted for nearly 87% of e-mail traffic this year, nearly a third more than last year. And that spam wasn't all about getting you to buy V1agra and C1al1s. Quite a bit of it was phishing bait, intended to get you to hand over your personal information and passwords. If you you're unsure whether an e-mail is phishing you, choose View -> Message -> Raw Source in Mail and check out the actual URLs the e-mail is linking to. And don't forget to train your junk filter rather than just deleting unwanted items.

As our filtering technology becomes more sophisticated, so does the spam. From the InformationWeek article, "Among the more effective new techniques was the use of image-based spam, which is much harder for security software to detect than text-based spam. The former accounted for 70% of the bandwidth taken up by spam this year..." David posted a great rule-based solution this summer for image spam that may help make a dent in your inbox.

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