The Truth About Spam

Contrary to the alarmist front page story on spam in today's NY Times, the truth is that spam has become a managable problem.

Longtime readers of this blog won't be surprised by that statement coming from me, as I've posted my thoughts on the subject here, and here, and here.

The Times shows this graph of the total amount of spam as a percentage of email on the Internet.

 

I am not arguing with this graph.  It's a fact that there is a ton of spam out there on the Internet.

But how much of it gets into your inbox?

I checked mine last night.  I got about 100 messages from 9pm last night until 6am this morning.  Only 10 of them were spam.  That's 10%.  That's lower than its ever been, thanks to Postini, my spam filter company.

Postini's not the only one who does this for Internet users.  There's Brightmail, now part of Symantec. There's Cloudmark, and a host of others. And then there's Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, Google Mail, who all filter spam from inboxes.

It's a big problem for all of them, but they are in that business.  They make money doing it in one way or another.

Think about this.  What percent of the postal mail you get every day is useless to you?  For me its about 75%.  And I have nobody filtering it.

With email, the filters work and they are going to get better and better and better.

Too bad the people at the New York Times would rather be Chicken Little.  I guess it sells more papers.

Comments

[Peter Hoskins]

I agree with you - spam is noise I just don't hear anymore. So if your and my experience is shared by many others then what's with the graph... It shows spam volume going up. Who's getting the spam? Once they get it they have to click or buy enough to cover you and me not clicking or buying.

[joe]

i agree somewhat. spam used to be a large problem. i'm using mac os x's junk mail filter and it filters roughly 98% correctly which is great.

but spam is still a problem as i'm receving around 100 spam mails per day (of which 98 are cought by the filter). but think about the bandwidth lost etc.

so, all in all: it doesn't bother my workflow but it should bother us as the wrong usage of the internet!

[Will Pate]

Managing spam at the inbox level less of a problem for power users (those that know how to use filters, or even what GMail is), but for for those on the lower rungs of internet literacy it's not getting any better. Sure it's better for you and I, but for the other 99% of the people that's just internet wishful thinking.

The harm that spam causes is not measured by how much of it gets in your inbox. A more accurate measurement of the harm caused by spam would look something like this:

(bandwidth x cost) + (crashed server time x avg hourly revenue) + (sys admin hours spent dealing with spam x avg sys admin hourly wage) + (number of phished credit cards x avg charge to stolen credit card)

I'm sure we could double or triple the number of variables in that equation, but you get the picture.

[Royal]

Not so manageable when you feel compelled to go through "the trash" every day to find something that shouldn't be there.

This happens much more than people want to acknowledge.

Try getting in touch with someone new (something sales professionals do on a daily basis).

Try getting in touch with an old contact (all professionals leverage their "network" from time to time).

Try talking to legitimate businesses who communicate with their customers via email: 30-40% of their in-house lists are getting blocked by SPAM filters.

Not being able to get in touch with 30-40% of your customers is the real business disaster.

The truth is SPAM -- or some other symptom of SMTP, the once-brilliant-but-now-showing-its-age-at-23 -- will always be around until we fix *the problem*: Authentication.

IM is living proof of this.

Look at the numbers. After a couple decades, SPAM (running over non-authenticated network) makes up to 80% of our in-boxes (depending on the study).

After a decade, "SPIM" (running over authenticated network) makes up a far less than 1% of all IM.

It's not that spammers haven't noticed the opportunity... it's because they can't SPIM in volume, which makes the effort much less interesting.

Until then, I remained confused why people think that a graph showing a *quadrupling* of something bad over a few year period somehow represents *overall* progress.

(Sorry for the long post.)

[Will Pate]

Just chiming in again to say that new numbers from a University of Maryland study estimate the loss of productivity from spam is costing US companies $22Billion per year. Some interesting discussion at Slashdot.

[Peer-to-Peer]

"International terrorism is inside your mailbox".

Peer-to-Peer released information today about international terrorism threats and a connection with email. "Since the London Subway bombings occurred on Thursday July 7, 2005 we've noticed a sharp increase in Rolex-Spam". Rolex-Spam is when someone sends an email offering to sell you an imitation Rolex watch. What consumers need to understand is the people selling these watches are generally groups that fund international terrorism". Peer-to-Peer (www.peertopeer.net) warns that purchasing any imitation products like Gucci hand bags and Rolex watches must be stopped. "Your funding bombs and weapons that might someday soon be used against you and your family". The best practice if you receive an offer is to delete the message. PeerToPeer.Net can help stop these messages but can not stop them all. "It's up to you to make the right decisions; use the delete key".