Spam Accounts for up to 95% of All Email

One of my favorite bloggers from Ars Technica has uncovered another stat that will shock and surprise. Jacqui Cheng cites Barracuda Networks' recent analysis of 50,000 email customers. Its findings show that 90-95% of all email is spam (and, no, it's not the kind that goes good with eggs on your breakfast plate).

Of course, Symantec thinks differently; they say that 71% of all messages are spam. Both companies, however, can agree on one thing: Spam messages are exponentially increasing. Barracuda cited only 5% of messages in 2001 as spam, which would represent an 18-fold increase in the mere span of six years. Though the 2003 CAN-SPAM act may have offered some light at the end of the tunnel to disgruntled spam recipients, the law offered little in the way of junk email reduction. The international spammers filled the niche left open by prosecuted U.S. spammers and new techniques such as sending spam with PDF and image attachments give some ill-deserved credibility in the eyes of anti-spam algorithms to spam shams.

Spam image by sumocat666 [cc, 2.0]