If it’s one thing we’re not short of, it’s
spam stats. Here are two more, fresh from the PR newswire:
Clearswift, “the world leader in managing and securing electronic communications” (I’ll be honest, I hadn’t heard of them until today), has this week launched a
Spam Index, in which it has found that “in contrast to recent reports that have suggested pornographic spam
constitutes 60-80 percent of spam, Clearswift’s Spam Index shows that
pornographic spam is found only 22 percent of the time. Instead, the largest proportion of spam – 23 percent – was distributed by companies selling direct goods.”
Also, a study released the same day by The Radicati Group Inc., “a leading independent market research firm” found that
email traffic has grown 80% over the past year, most of which it blames on spam, which it said represents 24% of total corporate email traffic.
Email size, it says, is also on the rise. Larger and more frequent use of attachments are the primary culprits for this trend. The full press release is only
available in Acrobat PDF format.
My tuppence: Radicati’s figure for total spam proportion seems way too low. And while I’d agree with Clearswift that porn does not dominate spam — I’m not sure where they got their figures, but their website press release headline blames a “sensationalizing media” for it — there seems to be a reason to be somewhat suspicious of their motives for telling us all this. Telling is a paragraph on their website press release that offers a spin on things:
Although it only takes one pornographic email to cause offence and land an organization in litigation for harassment, the level of unsolicited email that falls into the ?healthcare? and ?direct goods? categories suggests the problem of filtering spam is more complex than simply blocking profane and pornographic emails. Deciding whether or not an email is spam ultimately comes down to whether or not it is the result of a well executed and highly targeted email marketing campaign. The ability to deploy flexible spam filtering solutions that can take into account personal preferences will be vital in the fight against spam.
To be frank I’m not sure what this means. I think it means: not all spam is spam, some of it is ” well executed and highly targeted email marketing campaign”, and good spam filtering solutions deployed by corporates shouldn’t block all of it because some people might want this stuff in their inbox. I would have thought a company would want to keep out any junk that’s not specifically requested by an employee, especially if it’s for anti-ageing cream or Viagra. Odd, very odd. Can anyone explain this?
Apparently not to be outdone by Grokster’s new version, fellow file sharers StreamCast Networks, Inc., have announced a new, free, version of Morpheus, 3.2, free of spyware and laden “with new features, making file-sharing faster, safer and more secure”.
This in response to my 
