Spam Up Again

A study conducted by antispam email company Ipswitch, found that about 93% of all e-mail passing through its systems in May was spam.

Almost half of the junk email was related to mortgages and other loan arrangements. About 1 in 5 were pitching various medical products. A little under 10% of the messages were selling illegal pirated software products.

Over 5% of all messages involved some sort of attempt at "phishing." Phishing is where the mail sender is tries to get the recipient to divulge personal information for their own use. If the recipient gets tricked into it, the implications can be dire. There have been thousands of identity theft reports tracked back to these kinds of emails.

Roughly 5% of messages were related to some form of pornographic offering.

SpamButcher can help deal with all these kinds of spam. It can perform as an Outlook Express Spam Blocker, or be used with other email clients such as Outlook. SpamButcher even support alternative email clients like Thunderbird or Eudora.

SpamButcher is not related to Ipswitch or its research. Ipswitch offers a server-side spam tool for deployment by system administrators.

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