By Latest Count, 95% of Email Is Spam 198
An anonymous reader writes "The European Network and Information Security Agency released its new spam report, which looks at spam budgets, the impact of spam and spam management. Less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. This means the main bulk of mails, 95%, is spam. This is a very minor change, from 6%, in earlier ENISA reports. Over 25% of respondents had spam accounting for more than 10% of help desk calls. The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, and received replies from 100 respondents from 30 different countries."
I'm surprised it's that low (Score:5, Insightful)
I was seeing more like 97% (once you excluded system generated internal emails - CVS and Bugzilla between them can generate a fair bit of mail).
The killer for running our own mail system in its entirety was when I did the arithmetic and our co-hosted secondary mail server was costing more than buying Google for Domains. That's before you even consider the document management Google for domains offers, which was just icing on the cake.
Re:Micropayments again (Score:2, Insightful)
but one rarely hears of paying *each other* (rather than the host or government)
Only if you don't read the discussions. A scheme like that is proposed every time the topic comes to "how I would end spam once and for all". Go ahead and try it. Oh, you want everybody to switch? See, that is a fundamental problem: If your scheme requires a critical mass of people to adopt the scheme at the same time, then it won't work. (There are more problems with pay-for-email and email-bond schemes, but that is the most obvious one.)
Re:Accounting for help desk calls?! (Score:4, Insightful)
I too was the email guru once upon a time (last year). It boggled my mind that people simply could not understand that some email was spam, and that some valid mail got caught because their friends forwarded a forward or an ad company sent them an actual email. And I explained this to the same set of people over and over again.
Re:Bill Gates (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, that article is somewhat about captchas and I couldn't see any direct quotes from billy, considering that most email providers, live/gmail etc. use that tech. and my spam has virtually been reduced to zero in the last few years... No one can stop spammers from sending spam, but you can always filter it out.
Only 95%? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am surprised they conclude the fraction of good mails is as high as 5%.
From the CERN mail server report:
Incoming mails: 1992789
Rejected: 1952787 (98%)
Moved to Spam Folder: 14520 (1%)
Good mails: 25482 (1%)
Spam in Total 99%
And this is a good day. Often good mails are less than 1%.
Re:Logic? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Logic? (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. They are ignoring the huge volume of legitimate mail that hotmail/msn silently deletes in violation of the RFCs.
I for one support my online freedoms (Score:1, Insightful)
ISPs don't need to specifically disallow something that is already against the law. So, you find it dismaying that over 25% of ISPs allow you to use the bandwith you pay for in any way you wish as long as you don't do anything illegal. I assume that the alternative is that ISPs begin regulating Internet traffic based on their arbitary interpretations of what you are ethically allowed to do. (See: Peer-to-Peer netlimiting)
The thing is, if I send many thousands of emails in one day, I might be sending e-mails to some online community I manage, it might be related to some service I offer, or any number of other legal and ethical uses of the bandwith I paid for. The ISP can't know what those are unless they actually read my e-mails or closely monitor them (something I really don't want my ISP to do!). Even if they call me "What are you doing?" they still have to take my word for it or violate my (and others') privacy. Even if they knew exactly what I was doing and personally thought it was unethical but knew it was legal, I would argue against it being their right to interfere.
Re:might be a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't matter. There's no shortage of people who believe spamming will make them rich. Spam isn't going to go away just because it doesn't work.
Re:Bill Gates (Score:3, Insightful)
And what kills me is that he COULD HAVE, the bastard. Or at least, made a very large dent in it. All he had to do was have MS release some patches for Windows and give them for free to EVERYONE, "pirates" included. According to a quick search, 80 percent of spam comes from zombies. [google.com]