This is hardly news to anyone, but SPAM makes up about 65% of all email now, and has done for the last couple of months.
None of the laws outlawing SPAM have made much of a difference it seems. Part of my morning routine is to delete the 300 odd SPAM mails that Thunderbird (the email client I use) and Spamassassin (the anti-spam tool my mail servers use) detected. During the day, I usually get another couple of hundred SPAM as well.
Anyway, Brightmail have some statistics that reflect current SPAM levels, and it certainly doesn’t hold much hope for e-mail remaining a worthwhile communication medium. It really is like finding a shady, mostly illegal ad channel on cable and being forced to endure it for half an hour every morning. If it wasn’t for tools like Spamassassin and Thunderbirds SPAM detection abilities, I’d have long since removed all my hair by the fistful and relegated e-mail to a daily insight into the Internet’s lowest common denominator.
The only way SPAM will be reduced by any significant margin is if all the involved companies and open source groups put aside their “intellectual property” and monetary concerns and work together to create a totally open and extensible framework that everyone can abide by. At the moment, the commercial interests of some of the involved parties means that the effort as a whole will be mostly ineffective. If the new system is not in place on all the worlds big mail servers, then it simply won’t work.
And since most of the worlds big mail servers are running Open source programs like “Sendmail”, “Postfix” and “Qmail”, any commercial solution that doesn’t allow these programs to adopt the new process, will surely fail.
My hope is that they get their act together and sort something out soon as it is getting harder and harder to identify legitimate email from the dozens of ads for cheap Viagra, erectile enhancements, cheaper mortgages and 419 scams that I get every day.
Regards
Franki
