The War on Spam

By Brad

Encouraging news: Email spam traffic was down in the month of February. Not-so-encouraging news: It still account for over 73% of all email traffic. And despite some progress in deterring people from clicking on scams and other spam mail, spammers are stepping up their efforts. Via Ars Technica:

Because the successful click-though rate on spam emails is decreasing, spammers need to send out larger volumes of spam to remain profitable. This month’s spike shows that it requires little effort on spammers’ part to push that volume up. Thankfully, filtering technology at the level of ISPs and individual clients keeps most of the spam from ever being seen by an end-user, even when three-quarters of all e-mail traffic is spam. Still, botnets continue to be a significant problem, clogging our inboxes and taking up valuable resources on ISPs’ mail servers through the spam they generate.