Spam advertasing growing LARGE

This news will come as a shock to none, but the volume of spam has continued to rise throughout 2007. So much so, in fact, that spam researchers say that electronic junk mail has long surpassed the volume of human-issued e-mail this year, despite efforts to thwart it. One company, Barracuda Networks, goes so far as to say that spam now accounts for 90 to 95 percent of all e-mail, with no end in sight.

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The numbers come as part of the e-mail security company's annual spam report, in which it analyzed over one billion messages sent to its 50,000 customers. Barracuda says that the percentage of spam increased from 85-90 percent in 2006, and is way up from 5 percent back in 2001. After conducting a poll of 261 business professionals, Barracuda also found that over half—57 percent—consider spam to be the "worst form of junk advertising," almost double that of junk snail mail. Only 12 percent cited telemarketers as the worst.

95 percent is awfully high (and as far as I can tell, accurately describes the ratio of e-mail that hits the server for me), but not everyone agrees on those numbers. Symantec has observed the overall spam volume increase from an average of 56 percent of all e-mail traffic in 2006 to about 71 percent in 2007, Symantec spokesman David Forstrom told Ars.
It's hard to say which company's numbers are more accurate—"Different monitors can legitimately get different results," University of Calgary computer science professor John Aycock told us. What's important are overall trends. One thing that everyone agrees on is that spam continues to morph in an attempt to get through filters. Both Symantec and Barracuda say that they have observed an increased use in file attachments in 2007, like PDFs and images, and security software vendor MXSweep says that spammers are also focusing on sending MP3 and Excel spam.

Back in April, IDC predicted that spam would overtake human-issued e-mails in 2007, but this is one prophecy that we would have preferred didn't come true. The trend shows that the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act has done little to thwart spammers from upping the ante, despite suggestions to the contrary. A few charges may have been brought against spammers here and there, but the US government can only do so much when so many spammers are located elsewhere in the world and those in the US are so difficult to prosecute.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071212-report-95-percent-of-all-e-mail-has-that-spammy-smell.html