Spam is at 85, 95 do I hear 97 percent?

Like the stock market - the number of spam emails sent in a given period may swing up and down - but over the long run it only seems to rise.

It seems like every anti-spam firm and their brother wants to make some kind of specific claim regarding exactly how nasty the problem has become. Why? Because press people like to report numbers. If a security firm publishes some magic number in a press release, maybe, just maybe some news source will cite it in an article.

The company gets some free press, and some press dude avoids having to write a real article. Everyone wins!

For instance, I've heard rumor that Irish tech company IT Force claims junk mail now makes up 85 percent of all messages.

But wait, Ipswitch has just conducted an annual survey that puts the magic number at 95% of all email.

The difference is much bigger than it sounds. In effect, IT Force is claiming a spam to good email ratio of about 7 to 1, where IPSwitch puts the ratio at 20 to 1. That's a three-fold difference - one or both of them must be wrong.

However, to point the finger at these guys and lay blame would be the pot calling the kettle black. Sometime ago SpamButcher tried to create an ongoing index of how much spam is being sent. After a few months, it became pretty clear our methodology was broken - so we gave up on it.

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