According to an article on InformationWeek (via Digg), Spam Made Up 94% Of All E-Mail In December and was up 147% for 2006. This is causing big problems for IT departments.
The result is that unsolicited bulk e-mail is
getting bulkier. The 147% increase in spam that Postini observed in
2006 resulted in a 334% increase in e-mail processing requirement for
companies. “This is causing the e-mail infrastructure of many
businesses to melt down,” says Druker [VP marketing, Postini]. “Nobody budgeted for
four-and-a-half times more infrastructure capacity in one year.”
Here’s a post from the ASAE technology listserv this morning.
We get about 120 spam emails per minute, and so far are holding the line with our MailFrontier software (now owned by SonicWall) running on its own server, but 7 out of every 9 emails are spam, so I don’t know how much longer we can keep up.
So who’s sending all this spam and why can’t they be shut down? Turns out it’s being sent by unsuspecting users whose computers have been maliciously taken over by spammers. Worse, this means there’s no limit to the size of the attachments – which adds to bulk and infrastructure problems. Ugh. The good news is Korean police just arrested a pair of guys responsible for sending out 1.6 billion message between September and December of 2006.
We recently added a new spam filter to our email server. I haven’t noticed much of difference. I’m not sure software can fully solve the problem anyway.
How is your organization handling spam?
