Are 90% of emails sent today really spam?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 27 November 2006 22:00

Your IT - Entertainment

A new online report claims that 9 out of 10 emails sent out since June 2006 are spam, and come from criminal gangs out to get your money either through some kind of scam, be it for pain killing drugs or pills to enhance your sexual prowess. No wonder there’s been so much spam lately!

Have you noticed a pretty dramatic increase in spam over the past few months?

The spammers have been very active, controlling bot-nets around 100,000 compromised computers, giving an attacker a vast amount of computer storage and resources with which to do mind numbingly silly things like send out spam.

Unfortunately people are still susceptible to the concept of snake oil, and whether happily or not, people are buying these products from what are, for the most part, spam messages going into your spam folder with sometimes leaking into your inbox.

There has been such an increase in spam over the past few months that US email security company Postini has come out saying that today, 9 out of every 10 emails below sent and received is spam.

Spam volume almost tripled from June until today, with 7 billion spam messages detected in Novermber 2006, compared with only 2.5 billion in June.

One thing’s for sure – the spam is unlikely to stop. But the anti-spam companies are likely to be saying ‘wham, bam, thank you spam’ for quite some time yet.