
Ninety-five percent of email never reaches an inbox.
Email service providers trash 95 percent of the traffic headed to their customers’ inboxes, according to a survey from a European security group.
“[S]pam’s impact on the business has been greatly reduced through effective anti-spam measures,” the European Network and Information Security Agency reported recently in its third annual 2009 Anti-Spam Measures Survey.
“Anti-spam measures are doing their job, reducing the threat of spam to a manageable security process,” it added. “This process still requires focus, expertise and resources, but it is arguably predictable.”
“These measures currently filter out over 95 percent of email traffic, using a variety of methods, greatly reducing the volume of spam that customers receive, without causing significant problems with false positives,” it continued.
The researchers found “alarming” the current state of blacklist management.
Blacklists are one of the most common ways service providers block spam from leaving their servers, followed by outbound virus scanning and port 25 monitoring. Yet some 66 percent of the survey participants said their servers had been added or retained on blacklists incorrectly. What’s more, the same percentage told the surveyors that they believe that major blacklists sometimes incorrectly include servers that do not or no longer send spam.


Business Week
In November 2008 the antispam community collectively cheered as the McColo ISP, a major source of the spam on the internet, was disconnected by its network providers effectively shutting it down.
New figures from security analysts estimate
Cloud computing is a popular topic these days. One of the ways in which cloud computing is being delivered to businesses is by hosted email security services.
Anyone who uses the internet whether for business or for leisure has had first hand experience with spam at some point in time. Spam is a problem that plagues the internet and affects us all in some way. Like most problems the spam problem is a very complex one. There is no single source or cause of spam, which means there is no single solution to the problem. In this post I’ll explain some of the sources and causes of the spam that we see every day.
When you boil the spam problem down it becomes quite simple – someone is sending you emails that you don’t want to receive. This makes the anti-spam solution a simple one too – stop unwanted emails from arriving in someone’s email account. However, actually achieving this is a very complex task.
I was having a discussion with some associates of mine this week that work in IT support for a medium sized business across town from my office. Since we were talking about email servers the discussion inevitably came around to the topic of spam prevention.
Global economic downturn has lead to crashing stock markets, corporate bankruptcy, and rising unemployment. The economy and the dreaded “R word” are at the forefront of most people’s minds at the moment, and as with most big events the spammers are using the recession to scam people and make money.