Record Broken: 82% of U.S. Email is Spam

Datamation ^ | May 5, 2004 | Sharon Gaudin

[FourPeas]

Outdoing most analysts' worst predictions, spam accounted for 82 percent of all U.S. email last month.

After a two-month drop in spam, the number of unsolicited bulk email skyrocketed in April, bringing the saturation number up to record levels here in the U.S. and across the world, according to MessageLabs, Inc., a security company based in New York.

''This is as bad as we've seen it,'' says Paul Wood, chief information security analyst for MessageLabs. ''I think it's likely that it will continue to rise but perhaps not at the same rate that it did in the past month.''

And April did show a dramatic increase.

According to Wood, spam was on a steady increase last year, going from a 50 percent saturation in the middle of 2003 to 63 percent in January of this year. But then there was a largely unexpected sharp decline. February saw the rate drop to 59 percent, and March was even lower at 52.8 percent. That means in March, spam accounted for 52.8 percent of all the email traveling around the world.

But that drop was short-lived.

In April the rate shot back up, surpassing the January high, to hit 67.6 percent globally. And here in the United States, it hit 82 percent.

''You have to wonder if this will eventually affect people using email,'' says Wood. ''We haven't seen a decrease in email usage but we'll have to see how high the numbers go.''

Earlier in the year, security analysts warned that spam was increasing at such an alarming rate that they expected it to make up 80 percent of all email by the third quarter of 2004. That prediction was several months off.

And spam has a big market to target.

The Radicati Group, Inc. reports this week that there now are 980 million active email accounts around the world, and 40 percent of those are corporate accounts.

Wood says he attributes the drop in spam during February and March to the CanSpam Act that went into effect this past January. He adds, though, that the act, which has been criticized for not having enough enforcement teeth and for allowing far too much unsolicited email to continue to flow legally, hasn't stopped spamming. Wood says he figures that the major spammers just slowed down operations so they could figure out how to better dress up their spam to make it appear to fit into the legal limits.

Once that was done, they could resume operations with even more force.

''It's not legitimate,'' says Wood. ''It's just dressed up to make it look that way.''

Wood also attributes the rise in spam to the huge number of open proxies on the Net.

Virus writers began teaming up with spammers last year, and so far it's been a dangerous combination. Virus writers send out malicious code that infects computers and opens a back door in the machine. A hacker then can use that back door to remotely control the computer, sending out more viruses, Denial of Service attacks or millions of pieces of spam.

Wood estimates that 70 percent of spam is sent through open proxies.

[FourPeas]

This jives with my experience, too. The vast, vast majority of the e-mail I receive is spam. I keep a 'Spam' folder just so I can go searching when it appears I've missed an e-mail that I actually want. I've had to go searching there more times than I can count.

[b4its2late]

More like 85%, but what's a few percentage points among friends...... ;-)

[Drango]

This can't be 'cause congress passed a law outlawing spam.

[Diogenesis]

But, I get letters from interesting Nigerians
all rich and separated from their money.
One claimed to be stuck in orbit.

[FourPeas]

stuck in orbit

That's where I'd like to put them. They'd make very appropriate space junk.

[Drango]

But, I get letters from interesting Nigerians all rich and separated from their money.

You too? I didn't want to mention it, but I got an email about a month ago, I answered back, and as soon as the deal closes I'm gonna be rich, rich, rich. Yesterday I wired the Prince $10,000 to close the deal and I'll fly to Lagos next week to pick up the cash. I won't be able to sleep this weekend!

[Physicist]

The solution will be to wage economic warfare, not against the senders of spam, but against the advertisers who make use of it. Once the consequences of associating oneself with spam outweighs the potential benefits, it will stop.

[camas]

so bad here=almost 99%- that i changed my email address. now no more email.

[battousai]

The one thing I don't understand is that these guys are making money on this, so that means whatever they are advertising is actually real and there is some business behind, why can't we go get those businesses, the root of the problem?

[Lockbar]

"But, I get letters from interesting Nigerians
all rich and separated from their money.
One claimed to be stuck in orbit."


What?? You mean the pleas for help from the former president of Nigeria is junk mail? I thought he really needed my assistance! Now I'm hurt. :-(

[Skywalk]

If you register for any sites or shareware programs or anything like that, it's best to have a "Spam Account" so that you can be prepared for the huge amount of junk mail you'll get.

Then you use your other account to have your vital communications, etc. I have an AOl name that gets ZERO spam and it's not because I have any blocks up--it's just not in anyone's files.

[ilgipper]

As much as I hate spam, is this that much different than what comes in my mailbox (the USPS mailbox)

[ModelBreaker]

I use a junk account, too for signups. Recently, I found an outfit called inboxgenius.com. All my incoming mail flows thru them and they filter out spam. Have been using them for about a month and it works great. Cheap, too.

I thought I had a particularly bad problem with spam. But I guess not, given this article. My stats from the filter company says they are filtering 80.17% of my email this month.

[Publius6961]

What's an "open proxy"?
I am a not a computer expert and do not wish to become one, except perhaps as a means of self defense. It just seems to me that we can put men on the moon and control a spacecraft several billion miles from earth, but we can't devise a way to stomp on these bottom dwellers.

The technique of randomly choosing "big" words from a large list to insert in the "subject" line makes much of the spam easy to identify because most often the result makes no sense, but the millions of man-hours spent daily in just deleting this s**t is intolerable.

I would be most curious to hear from others, more expert than I about these things, about what is so hard about finding these a******s and giving them all some serious jail time. No matter where they live. For instance, by can't servers who have a greater than average incidence of hosting these guys be banned from internet traffic altogether? I would be willing to pay to help this happen.

[elli1]

''You have to wonder if this will eventually affect people using email,'' says Wood. ''We haven't seen a decrease in email usage but we'll have to see how high the numbers go.''

Already has, at least in my case.

[Publius6961]

I keep thinking that there must be some way for legitimate senders to identify themselves to my account in such a way that if they fail to do so, the mail does not come through. Is it really that complicated?

[Caesar Soze]

Use something like Thunderbird, and you won't spend millions of hours deleting spam. At most, a few minutes a day reading headers in your junk box to make sure the 'bird didn't filter out some real mail by mistake.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

[snooker]

Get a junk account on yahoo. They have good spam filters.

Then delete/change your isp account address.

Never sign up for anything with your real isp address, always use your yahoo account. Only give your ISP email address to friends and trusted individuals. Works for me. I rarely get any spam through my isp. My yahoo account gets 100s of spam emails a day.

You can also use mozilla email. Mozilla has built in spam filtering.

[johnb838]

If it doesn't work out just shake hands with the guy and it'll make his penis shrivel up and disappear.

[FourPeas]

Sadly, I learned the lesson of a spam mailbox too late. I have one set-up now, but my regular one is already on The List. Since we own our own domain and our hosting service allows us unlimited e-mail addresses, I have considered creating a separate e-mail account for each place I do business on-line. That way I know if one of them decides to sell me out to the spammers.