Spam is Now 90% of All Emails

A Reuters report out of London says that “criminal gangs using hijacked computers are behind a surge in unwanted e-mails peddling sex, drugs and stock tips.”

According to Postini, a U.S. email security company, “The number of spam messages has tripled since June and now accounts for as many as nine out of 10 e-mails sent worldwide.”

"E-mail systems are overloaded or melting down trying to keep up with all the spam," said Dan Druker, a vice president at Postini.

The Reuters report observes that “as Christmas approaches, the daily trawl through in-boxes clogged with offers of fake Viagra, loans and sex aids is tipped to take even longer.”

Postini has detected a staggering 7 billion spam e-mails worldwide in November compared to 2.5 billion in June.

According to Spamhaus, an agency that tracks the problem, “About 200 illegal gangs are behind 80 percent of unwanted e-mails.

Reuters: Experts blame the rise in spam on computer programs that hijack millions of home computers to send e-mails. These "zombie networks", also called "botnets", can link 100,000 home computers without their owners' knowledge. They are leased to gangs who use their huge "free" computing power to send millions of e-mails with relative anonymity.

Junk Mail May Never Die

Louise Story, writing in the New York Times, sheds light on why in the age of the Internet and email, junk mail is proliferating:

“United States Postal Service says marketers sent more than 114 billion pieces of direct mail, increase of about 15 percent from five years ago; volume of bulk mail, which is all direct mail, exceeded first class in last year; advertisers like it that mail ads, which do not get snagged in spam filters, can be aimed at just right customers and be monitored for effectiveness; those traits are increasingly important to companies as they target American public into finer and finer categories; some advertising executives comments.”

Info that Shouldn't Be Revealed

Katharine Herrup, writing in the New York Sun says, “Exhibitionism in America has always existed. But it has been particularly evident in the newer media. The degradations of Reality TV were pretty bad — before then, no one could imagine so many minutes of tears on television. But newer media are allowing people to further degrade themselves. MySpace and Friendster are the examples of sites that can be fun and useful, but can also be sorely abused and depressing. When 13- year-old girls promote their body measurements, as they do on such sites, something is wrong….”

Info that Nobody Wants

A study by conducted Commtouch indicates that most spam originates from websites hosted in countries outside the U.S. Pharmaceutical drugs are most advertised, with Viagra the leading the way.

The recipients of these largely unwanted messages are nearly all in the U.S. Meanwhile, despite filters and spaminators, the pace of spam is accelerating . The aggregate number of unique spam outbreaks per day has been rising for for more than five years.

Websites: 100 Million, so Far

• The Web has reached 100,000,000 sites
• In August 1995 there were 18,000 sites