A Better Way To Measure The Spam Flood

By | December 7, 2004

Here’s an interesting take on spam which helps illustrate how big a problem it has become.

Florida-based email service ZeroSpam Net (0SpamNet) says (via email, afraid no URL available at time of writing) that current methods of measuring spam, as a percentage of total email traffic, has become meaningless.

Two years ago, seeing Spam grow from 60% to 70% in a month or two had some meaning. Over the last couple of months the impact of Spam growing from 85% to 90% has been lost by being reported as a percentage. That last 5% of growth as a percentage of total traffic represents a 50% growth in the total volume of Spam. Measurement of Spam volume as a percentage of total traffic is a poor indicator of the ever increasing size of the Spam problem.

Instead it proposes an index, which it calls the ZSN Spam Index, which accounts for spam and legitimate email growth against a constant reference value of 100 valid messages. This takes into account the increase in normal email traffic — roughly 12% per year. The index goes back to November 2002, with a value of 66.67 — i.e. about 67 spam messages for every 100 valid emails. Now the index is at 782.12. That’s 800 spam messages for every 100 valid ones. Gasp.

Here’s the chart (PDF).

Why do people never talk about CAN-SPAM anymore, I wonder?

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