How Much Spam?

This article is mainly of interest due it quoting some radically different spam-level numbers than a previous posting. According to a recent study by IDC - spam email account for 38% of all email.

A similar study done by FrontBridge pegged it at 82% for August. Some difference is reasonable - but August being twice as spammy as the rest of the year doesn't sound right.

Even with a radically large set of data points - its very easy to cook up different results.

Having tried to come up with a mail spam tracking system myself - I know it's hard.

The 14 people who had been tracking the "Spam Spotting" index may notice it hasn't been updated in sometime. This is due to concerns about the underlying data growing inaccurate. It was based on voluntary reporting - which seemed to work pretty well - until a few excited system administers started forwarding messages caught by their server side spam email blockers by the thousands. Many of the attempts to measure relate to how much spam a certain spam stopper service has caught over an amount of time.

While this gives a rough idea of the spam level - at the same time its not really possible to factor in the performance of the spam killer itself. If spammers get smarter, and more spam makes it past the filter - the spam level would appear to go down, even if the amount of spam being sent stays the same. On the other hand - if the anti-spam program has problems with false positives - the wanted mail would get counted as spam.

I'm sure the information is out there someplace - but I'm happy as long as SpamButcher is catching 97+% of my spam.

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