A New Wave of Spam
Junk Email (Spam)
Posted by Adam Hayes
Nine out of Ten emails sent over the Internet are unsolicited, plain, old, ugly Spam.
The New York Times recently ran an article about the increasing wave of E-mail Spam. The newest wave consists of penny stocks, new mortgage applications, bank account change notices, seemingly long lost friends, and the ever present blue pill or its variants. Most anti-spam program companies aren't able to patch the holes as fast as spammers can create new ones.
Some antispam veterans are not optimistic about the future of the spam battle. “As an industry I think we are losing,” Mr. Peterson of Ironport said. “The bad guys are simply outrunning most of the technology out there today...They have taken away so many of the hooks we can use to look for spam.”
Spam is back — in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone’s minds. In the last six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.
For myself, spam is merely an annoyance. It is the price paid for having email. Unfortunately, there are too many people that don't immediately delete that email from an address they don't recognize. The bigger problem is when you allow your spam blocker to be ever more aggressive in blocking spam and have poor aunt Ruth's first email get whisked away to the junk mail folder.
I'm still waiting for the joyous day when a new technology will replace the antiquated email system. However, until then, we will have to just accept junk mail as a necessary evil.
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