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Spam doubles in the last year
Author: Wil HarrisPublished: 6th December 2006
Spam is clogging the tubes.
Much of this increase is down to image spam - where text is dropped in favour of a Gif containing whatever amazing stock offer or penis enlargement pills happen to be the deal of the day. Image spam is designed to circumvent text filters and often has a tagline that makes it seem like the email is from a mate - 'Hey, it's Joey', or whatever.
Junk mail now makes up 9 in every 10 email messages sent.
Image spam has quadrupled in the last six months, and the only obvious answer appears to be to block emails that have image attachments, which clearly isn't ideal. If you happen admin your own spam filter, it also appears that blocking email wholesale from a few key countries can do the trick, although this isn't exactly great for business.
Much of the spam comes from the increase in spyware. Whilst spyware has mostly stopped hosing people's machines for fun, it has started using these infected machines as spam relays. Many people think the spam problem could be cut down with better internet security for home users, which could appear with Windows Vista.
Have you been deluged in spam recently? Let us know over in the forums.
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Comments (21)Stats: 0.183 seconds
Sadly even though I've had that email address for about 7 years now it's to to abandon it :(
Only 1 or 2 a day but its still annoying.
My girlfriend has a couple of websites with guest books and comments sections so she gets drowned in spam and is keeping a daily tally of it all. So far she is up to around 15,000+ spam emails for this year alone, in fact she sees a higher average than the quoted 9 out of 10, around 9.7/9.8 out of 10 would be a better estimate for her even with filters in place.
The one thing I do though is check thoroughly when signing up for something that I don't allow them or other companies the right to send me e-mails.
My e-mail addy is quite unusual though, that could help a bit.
In a very sad way Spam helps run the economy. I wonder what the dollar value of the global spam filtering business is.
I can't believe it. Maybe your ISP has a good spam filter enabled on your mail account.
Also if my private email account does start to get overloaded with spam then ill just delete it and create me a new email account as I can have 10,000 email accounts with my domain.
I have a hot mail account for MSN. I have never used the hotmail email address to sign up anything or even doing anything with it. I actually went into the email account for the first time in 2 years and there were thousands of emails in there. All spam. Im glad I dont use it as if thats the amount of spam you can get without using your email account I wonder how much Id get if I used it.
(Thank goodness for "select all" and "delete selection")
What I wonder is just how much the spammers are making from people actually buying products from spam. I mean, it's can't be THAT much, can it?
Forgot to say that I use hotmail. I don't even get any spam being filtered to my junk forder. Alot of my e-mails are from bit-tech for my subscribed threads.
Very odd I know, but I'm not complaining!