Good news for all of us who still have to use email: spam rates are dropping! In fact, junk messages now account for just 49.7 percent of all emails.
The latest figure comes from security firm Symantec's June 2015 Intelligence Report, which notes this is the first time in over a decade that the rate has fallen below 50 percent. The last time the company recorded a similar spam rate was back in September 2003, or almost 12 years ago.
More specifically, Symantec saw 704 billion email messages sent in June, of which 353 billion were classified as spam. At one of the peaks of the spam epidemic, in June 2009, 5.7 trillion of the 6.3 trillion messages sent were spam, according to past data from Symantec.
(Score: 1) by TheMessageNotTheMessenger on Sunday July 19 2015, @07:34PM
I guess that's true. My spam filter only lets through a single spam message a month, it has pretty much no false positives, but I check weekly to be sure.
Hello! :D
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday July 20 2015, @08:25AM
Unfortunately, there's been research that shows that this doesn't actually work. The people originating the spam are often also victims. The people making the money are the ones selling direct marketing services to slightly shady people. They don't need their campaigns to be effective, they just need a new sucker to believe that they'll be effective.
A lot of the rest of spam these days is for scams and so needs a very small return rate to be profitable. They use things like bad spelling to filter out intelligent people from their victim pool - if you're the kind of person who will notice that this email from your bank is barely literate and comes from mybankhonest.muahahahaha.com then you're probably harder to scam.
sudo mod me up