Spam tops 80% of all email
Postini, the spam-catching and security-monitoring company, has released 
its report on the health of email for September 2006.
The company claims that spam now accounts for four out of every five emails that passed through the company’s scanners, an increase of 1.6% over August.
It also reports that,
at any given time, 50,000 unique computers on the Internet that were simultaneously exhibiting malicious behavior such as attempting to propagate spam, viruses, phishing and other attacks against email communications.
Virus-laden emails made up 0.44% of all emails that the company scanned.
Either I am particularly blessed or these reports are a bit of a beat-up.
Even when you read them cautiously (it only measures the email that Postini sees — c. 9 billion emails, and the company has a vested interest in talking the problem up), it seems so out of whack with the amount of spam than passes through my accounts.
I reckon that only 30-40% of my emails are spam. Perhaps my email service catches the rest, perhaps Australians are not desirable targets, perhaps things are worse in the corporate email world, perhaps personal experience is not the most statistically sound starting point.
Of course, that’s 30-40% too much but it’s not prophet of doom material.
Tags: email, Internet, phishing, spam, the end is nigh, virusesRelated posts
October 24th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
We did rely in the past on Postini to protect part of our clients. They do an excellent job at catching English SPAM so I would assume - provided no marketing hysteria has influenced the numbers they publish - that their statistics are accurate. Unfortunately, their engine used to fail rather catastrophically with other languages - a lot of French in our case - so it would be interesting to know whether their statistics are as precise as they claim for Euro-Junk. Still, an interesting report and a very interesting post!
October 24th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
Hmm. You are lucky. Fully 95% of my email to one of my addresses is spam. The percentage has crept up consistently over time - I’ve had the email address for almost a decade. My other addresses get almost none, because I rarely, if ever, use them in forums or on websites which won’t protect them.
I have one old email address which gets no legitimate email and a steady trickle of spam - because I used it to sign up for information about a single piece of software eight years ago, then later unsubscribed from their own information list, leaving me only on the lists of those they sold my details to. That would be 100%, right? :)
October 24th, 2006 at 9:21 pm
I should add, JunkMatcher does a top notch job of dealing with it all - thanks for passing on the news about it.
October 24th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
I run a mail server that processes ~5 million messages a day. Of those, we throw out 3.5 million, while delivering the rest. I am pretty conservative, much preferring a false negative to a false positive, so the only complaints I get are about too much spam getting through.
I would say the Postini numbers are a bit high, but not outlandishly so. I would imagine they are pretty accurate for a large ISP, like AOL or Yahoo, with a high churn rate on accounts.
October 25th, 2006 at 2:25 am
Dont forget a lot of spam services classify mail to unkown users as SPAM (so a directory harvest attack which no one with a valid email account would see - is counted as spam) We use http://www.reflexion.net and it separates mail to unkown users from spam. Gross numbers are roughly 85% is mail to unknown users and less than 10% of the volume is spam. Approx 5% of the volume is valid mail. This number is being calculated against 30M messages.
October 25th, 2006 at 7:16 am
Sadly, I’m up to 68% spam or roughly 3600 spam messages since October 1st, if it wasn’t for Spamsieve I’d be completely lost. BTW, unknown users account for none of that amount.
October 25th, 2006 at 8:54 am
It looks like I am just lucky, then, from all these comments. Nice for me :)
@FJ — Interesting about the English-centric nature of spam engines. I hadn’t considered that before.
October 25th, 2006 at 10:05 am
Yep, spam filters have strenghts and weaknesses in languages too. For example Korean or asian languages are notoriously hard to filter