Almost everyone hates spam. The only people that don't hate it are the ones that make vast amounts of money from sending it. The profits they turn are so large that regardless of what spam fighters do, the amount of spam keeps increasing. According to web security firm MessageLabs, spam accounted for 81.5 percent of all e-mail traffic in June.
This number, which is calculated based on 3 billion e-mail connections that MessageLabs scans every single day, more or less corresponds with US-specific data. An analysis of year-to-date spam rates for individual US states shows that the percentage of e-mails that were spam range from 77 (Montana) to 91 percent (Illinois). In other words, in every single state in the US, over three quarters of e-mails sent are junk. The average spam level in the US was 86 percent in June.
"Different socioeconomic factors and levels of security awareness" are the reason for varying spam levels from state to state. Put more simply, spam levels depend on overall IT security in a given state, how comfortable users are to share their e-mails on public domains, and other decisions made that end up helping or hurting spammers," said MessageLabs antispam technologies Matt Sergeant. It should be noted that the software use to block junk e-mail is not a factor here since MessageLabs' data describes the amount of spam sent in the first place, and not how much of it is filtered or blocked.
Sergeant also noted a recent trend of spammers, saying that his company's data shows that it is "mailed out in smaller, more targeted batches, and spammers are using varying approaches from leveraging celebrity names and current events to grab attention." Spam filters aren't very useful if the user is interested in the headline and opens up the e-mail.
Spam, which former Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates predicted would be conquered by 2006, has instead entrenched itself as a fact of online life.
