E-mail security firm MessageLabs' filtering statistics for April, which were published on Monday, show that 67.6 percent of all global e-mail traffic is spam.
MessageLabs said it scanned 840 million e-mail messages in April and found that 97 percent of spam is aimed at five countries: the US, the UK, Germany, Australia and Hong Kong. The US has the worst problem, with 83 percent of messages being classified as spam, while in the UK that figure stands at 53 percent.
Mark Sunner, chief technology officer at MessageLabs, said that although the US has the worst overall spam problem, the increasing penetration of broadband in the UK could mean similar figures by the end of the year.
"It's only a matter of time until the UK falls victim to similar volumes of spam. When it comes to the Internet, when the US sneezes, the rest of us catch a cold," Sunner said.
One small UK company with just six full-time employees claims to have already caught the American spam cold. Vbug, a Microsoft developer support company, which has been running for 10 years and has had a Web site for the past seven years, last month received around 720,000 e-mails messages, 99.84 percent of which were spam.
Graham Parker, Vbug's chairman, said his employees had to spend more time each day finding the few legitimate e-mails among this mountain of spam.
Parker suspects Vbug could have been the victim of a malicious spamming campaign, but he concedes that it could be because the same e-mail addresses have been published on the Vbug Web site for so many years.
"E-mail addresses get harvested from Web sites and then are sold on. We have had our domain for the last seven years and are now in the process of celebrating our tenth birthday," said Parker.
Parker considered changing the company's e-mail addressed to a new domain, but was worried about losing touch with older contacts, so instead signed up E-mail Systems, a small e-mail-filtering company.
"By changing e-mail addresses, you run the risk of losing contact with people you want to stay in touch with. Instead, we installed our spam filtering system three months ago and it made a dramatic change, overnight," Parker said.
Any filtering software contains the risk that legitimate messages may be filtered out by mistake, but Parker said this is a small price to pay.
"There is an issue with false positives, but to lose the odd e-mail is worth it. It is a no-brainer," Parker said.
there are simple solutions to spam that nobody seems to be mentioning.
basically all ISP's should be bouncing emails that dont have valid email addresses in the to: cc: or bcc: fields. i get spam daily addressed to different variations of my email address and why my ISP's spam filtering software isnt smart enough to block this garbage is beyond me.
i even get spam delivered to my inbox that doesnt even have MY email address in the email. why is my ISP letting this through?
personally i feel that an email link between two parties needs a 'trust' scenario devised. similar to the messenger programs, when you first email someone they get a message informing them of what you are doing and get an option to reply and approve receipt of the emails, or ignore the request and blackban the senders address.
this is a basic description and would no doubt end up, instead of thousands of spam emails entering my inbox, but thousands of email requests instead i suppose.. but regardless, a trust based system is going to be the only way to eradicate spam once and for all.