Filed under: Internet
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
gillsans said 6:34PM on 12-29-2006
That's not terribly surprising, considering probably 90% of my actual-in fact-physical mail is junk. It's just not as graphic or personal...
Also does that include junk mail that I've technically registered for? Probably 75% of my email is from Amazon, MacMall, REI and other places I've actually ordered things from.
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cristian said 3:21PM on 12-29-2006
I've never get spam :-D
Except in my gmail account :S
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Martha said 3:32PM on 12-29-2006
Spam outbreaks got bigger, faster, and smarter during 2006.
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Taylor said 3:44PM on 12-29-2006
Hope it's not clogging up all the tubes :-/
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Fritz Laurel said 5:06PM on 12-29-2006
@4 - The tubes -- bahahahaha. Nice ;)
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mbd said 9:56PM on 12-29-2006
I run a mail server that's been on the net for well over 10 years now, and have been running software that creates graphs of how much spam is received vs how much is actually delivered to mailboxes. Reasons for not delivering would be due to a variety of reasons including suspected spam/phishing/virus emails as well as legitimate rejections of incorrectly addressed mails etc.
For the past year 9,391,126 mails were sent to my server. Of those only 1,762,039 emails were accepted.
So, for me, it's about 18% of mails that are accepted, and 82% rejected. Of course this figure isn't entirely accurate given that some rejections aren't due to spam, and also because a reasonable number of spams still make it past the checks.
It's a pretty crappy signal to noise ratio.
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scrumph said 5:40AM on 12-30-2006
Most of my spam is the "Message undeliverable" generated from emails that I didn't send using false email addresses - the problem of having one's own domain for email.
I think these are all from compromised PCs *spit* that have my email - the day I find out whose it is...
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Glen Grayson said 3:20PM on 1-14-2007
Well, I set this up on the numerous macs that I administer, as well as the two users (my personal "home" and my business "home" users on my MBP. ON my business side, I added another condition that the "sender is not in my address book", as it was putting too many real messages in to JUNK at first.
It is working great now- very little JUNK hits my INBOX.
However, I notice that the mail I send out is flagged as JUNK in my SENT folder, and mail that I receive from myself goes into JUNK instead of my INBOX.
Any thoughts on how to fix this?
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