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Spam Rate Dropping Below 50% for the First Time in 12 Years

posted by martyb on Sunday July 19 2015, @07:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-canned-meat-sales-are-on-the-rise dept.

soylentsandor writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Sunday July 19 2015, @09:11PM

    by Whoever (4524) on Sunday July 19 2015, @09:11PM (#211174) Journal

    I don't know what Google is doing, but I think that they use outdated RBLs.

    I run my own mail server in a VPS. I have never sent SPAM. If I send email to a "clean" Gmail account from that IP address, it is identified as SPAM. Sending the same email via my ISP's mail server results in the email not being identified as SPAM. The only thing to change is the IP addresses, but my own mailserver's IP address has been clean for plenty enough time for it to be delisted (it might have been listed because of its use before it was assigned to me). Furthermore, my IP address is not listed on any reputable RBLs.

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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday July 19 2015, @10:08PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday July 19 2015, @10:08PM (#211182) Homepage

    I think most algorithmic (not purely a block list) spam blockers automatically block anything coming from an unnatural domain (basically, anything that is not gmail.com, yahoo.com, *.edu, and so on). I have a personal domain and it's a pain sometimes.

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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday July 20 2015, @07:25AM

      by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Monday July 20 2015, @07:25AM (#211317) Homepage
      I'll see your pain, and raise triple pain. I run my own server, from the middle of an ISPs IP block shared by scummy virus-ridden windoze PCs, so nobody likes what I send out. However, one of the domains pointing to that IP address is asdf.org (and another is asdf.fi, and another is asdf.ee), and everyone and their pet goat who is forced to sign up to sites and has to give an email address gives asdf+sn@asdf.org, without the "+sn" (I'm not stupid, I'll monitor my logs). That alone isn't enough to cause the 30000-100000 attempted spams I get per day (99.9% are blocked almost instantly, some I don't see because of fail2ban). The fact that the previous owner of the .org domain was a fairly big target for attacks means that most of the attempts are a coordinated DDoS, and that's part of the reason he traded the domain to me.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @01:24AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @01:24AM (#211240)

    I run a few email servers on VPSs. I set up SPF records & DKIM and have no problems getting through to any recipients.

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday July 20 2015, @06:48AM

    by frojack (1554) on Monday July 20 2015, @06:48AM (#211313) Journal

    They don't use RBLs at all.

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    • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday July 20 2015, @02:34PM

      by Whoever (4524) on Monday July 20 2015, @02:34PM (#211435) Journal

      They don't use RBLs at all.

      And you know this how?

      My experiments suggest strongly that they do. That the same email when delivered from one IP address is marked as SPAM, but when delivered by a different address is not marked as SPAM is strong evidence that they do use some kind of IP reputation system. They might not call it an RBL, but it functions like one. Maybe it's not DNS based, hence the term RBL is not valid.