Email/Spam

[Siji]

Link

90% of emails could be spam by the end of the year

A vast majority of your emails could be spam by the end of the year. The Threat Research and Content Engineering Team of European-based Marshal company says a new Asian botnet is spewing spam at an alarming rate.

Since October 2006, the botnet has accounted for a 280% increase in spam traffic and the company says 90% of your emails will be spam by the end of the year. "If the current increases in spam volumes continue in 2007, users can expect at least 90 per cent of all emails received to be spam by the end of the year," said Bradley Anstis, Director of Product Management for Marshal.

According to Marshal, spam levels are currently hovering at around 85% of all incoming emails. This probably will not surprise most IT managers who have to spend hours every week tweaking filters to stop the flood of spam emails. Some companies have reported that 95 to 99% of their incoming emails are spam.

And yet, it's not yet priority #1 to come up with a new standard in email. Laws addressing this issue are worthless. A new standard needs to be designed and implemented. Yeah, it'll cause problems in some instances - but at this point, it has to be done and it has to be done sooner than later. The last thing we need is another 802.11n situation.

[Zaelath]

I get ... hrmm ... none.

[Winnow]

I barely get any spam and that's on an email address that's been around since 1997.

As long as you're sensible and use a separate email to sign up for bulletwn boards or anything else commercial on the internet, you'll be fine. Save your primary email for friends and government/banks etc.

One way your email gets dished around is by relatives that don't have a clue, forwarding your email along with a huge list of others when distributing stupid email chain letters etc...eventually that list gets in the wrong hands.

[Siji]

It's probably safe to say that the majority of people here don't get the same amount of spam that John Q Public gets because, as Winnow said, we know not to pass around our main email accounts.

The fact is that spam is out of control and is only getting worse. I get spams on accounts that I've never given out or used anywhere. There's no downside to sending out a million emails to randomly generated addresses that only 50% of actually exist. And if one person out of those million emails actually purchases the product, that flood has been paid for.

[Aslanna]

I receive probably close to 100 spam emails a day. Fortunately Yahoo filters most of them but 2-3 a day usually still gets though.

[Deward]

I think I have had my yahoo account for going on ten years. I probably get 500 spam a day. Yahoo does a pretty good job of filtering and I delete anything I don't recognize. I usually have to delete about 20 a day from my mailbox. I attribute this to old message boards I used to frequent way back.

[Fash]

The increase in spam during 2006 has really hurt the email scheme I use where every address @ my domain is valid and comes to my inbox.

I started this back in 2000 and used it for many purposes. Most importantly to me was that I used a unique address for anything that requested an email address.... Then if I got spam on that address, I knew who gave me up. I received maybe 2 spam/month for at least a year or two.. since then, I've blocked thousands of incoming addresses through an automated process.

Back around november, maybe even earlier, the number of random addresses hitting my email went through the roof. While I would like to re-do my email platform with the full set of spam protection and blacklists I just haven't found the time, so I have begun using Thunderbird as an interface to my IMAP mail and so far the junk controls have greatly decreased the time I waste getting rid of the junk.

[Kelshara]

The amount of spam we are getting at work is ridiculous and it is increasing rapidly. Insane.