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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   
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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Original Submission

• Re:Well, except at Gmail (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Monday July 20 2015, @08:29AM

  by TheRaven (270) on Monday July 20 2015, @08:29AM (#211335) Journal

  I don't know if Google's software works in the same way, but from talking to people at Yahoo! this is a common issue that they run into. The reason their spam filtering works better than client-side filtering for a lot of people is that a lot of people get the same spam and they can aggregate the data about what mails are spam. If you have a few million people using your mail service, then an email that a few hundred people flag as spam probably is and you can make sure that no one else sees it. Unfortunately, a lot of people sign up to mailing lists and think that hitting the spam button is easier than unsubscribing, so you often end up with the software learning that a mailing list is a spam source. Yahoo! does some per-user whitelisting for this, so that they will flag the mailing list as a spam source but if you mark messages from it as not-spam then it will override that decision and let it through for you. I don't know to what extend Google does this, but given the structure of how a lot of their services are implemented, I suspect that their spam detection is mostly a bulk operation that uses the same dataset for everyone.

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