Technology, training, learning and development blogs

Spam – we’re getting one-sixth of it and it’s getting worse

Ouch! According to spam filtering company IronPort, the UK now gets around one-sixth of the world’s spam. That’s between 100-1000 spam messages a day to each business inbox.

The UK is getting around 20 billion spam e-mails each and every day – and spam volumes have doubled in 2007. About 60% of spam is either pushing Viagra and the like or is ‘pump and dump’ stock market spam (where the spammers push out stock updates for low-value firms, having just ‘bought low’ – when people act on the spam messages – yes, they do – it pushes the stock prices up and spammers cash in).

Every e-mail administrator knows that there’s no doubting the size of the problem – it’s a major headache. For organisations, the only real line of defence is technology – keeping up with technology is often the best that can be done to defend a company against spam.

Yes, it’s true that most spam messages are sent to e-mail addresses that are ‘harvested’ off the net – but it’s not realistic for companies to hold off publishing e-mail addresses, they might as well not bother turning up for work.

So far, methods other than technological have been pretty lame – the US’s ‘can spam’ act has achieved little, for instance. But, if spam is going to be brought under control, it’s going to take more than technology to do it. The most common suggestions are:

• international legislation, with highly punitive sentences, backed by cross-country policing.
• charging for e-mails sent by volume or bandwidth.

The chances of putting either of these in place while the Internet is unregulated and while co-operation between countries is piecemeal at best are not high. So, back to technology then...

Thank goodness that the spam controls on Exchange Server (just about the world’s most deployed corporate e-mail system) are good and getting better!