SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
martyb
on Sunday July 19 2015, @07:23PM
from the but-canned-meat-sales-are-on-the-rise dept.
from the but-canned-meat-sales-are-on-the-rise dept.
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.
Original Submission
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Spam Rate Dropping Below 50% for the First Time in 12 Years
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 23 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Tax reform means "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind
the tree."
-- Russell Long
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Monday July 20 2015, @05:38AM
I only unsubscribe from mailing lists that I actively subscribed to.
If some group starts sending me uninteresting stuff I didn't ask for, I won't unsubscribe, I'll automatically delete them. We often see this happen when a company gets sold - initially there might have been an occasional mildly interesting email but the new owners take to pumping out junk.
I have an innate distrust of any "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of emails. (GNU Mailman I trust, anything else unlikely.) If I didn't specifically request it, I am not confirming the address is valid by "unsubscribing". Email is a one-way medium - like sending me a letter - you have no guarantee it was read or even if it arrived. I won't let HTML mail fetch links either, so if you fail to send me mail that I can see in plain text, then I won't read your missive.
Of course, since I run my own mail system, so I can afford to automate the trashing of junk. I realise there are probably issues with the way "normal people" treat junk mail - if people move "unwanted" mail into the "junk" folder, then this pollutes the junk-detection algorithms.
In the end it matters not what I do - people with similar habits (and ability) being a minuscule proportion of Internet-users. What matters is what happens for the 80%. It's hard - how can I tell people "don't reply to stuff you didn't ask for" when this is what "good actors" are supposed to do (per CAN-SPAM Act). It's impossible to teach people things when both situations and results are difficult to understand without a deep understanding of what is going on at multiple levels: technological, historical, political and; dare I say it; criminal.
Maybe GMail, et al, could monetise (ugh!) a product that aggregated all the "junk" (not spam) into a daily "mail shot". Automate the collection of everything that got put in a user's junk mail by rules, and collate into a single long email with a variety of sections, similar to the way the aforementioned Mailman software collates the day's posts into a single daily digest on request. Of course, this would mean that Google would become an even larger gorilla, gatekeeper of the world's electronic junk mail - but at least we could ignore one email a day instead of many.