Is Spam Up or Down?

The Gartner group recently released a study suggesting that the level of spam on the internet has actually been going down. Anti-spam vendors have been quick to dispute these results.

I haven't seen the original study - and most of the claims made by the vendors seem anecdotal - so I don't know who to take more seriously.

My own observation is that the SpamButcher spam email blocking software seems to be catching a similar amount of spam as it was 9 months ago.

The article doesn't do a good job explaining which statistic was actually being measured:

Total spam email sent
Spam email caught by a particular anti-spam programs
Spam email that actually got through to people's inboxes
Each one of these stats is only loosely tied to the others.

I think that advancements in email spam filter technology have probably helped reduce the -percentage- of spam that users actually wind up having to deal with in their inbox. The most effective way of stopping spam email is by using a client-side spam filter such as SpamButcher. SpamButcher is available as a free anti-spam download - with a 21-day trial period.

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