Spam email volumes drop to 11 year low … really?

spam volumes drop facts worth knowingAccording to cyber security firm Symantec’s June monthly threat report, Symantec Intelligence, the overall spam rate has dropped to 49.7 percent, the lowest it’s been since September 2003.  But is that really true?

The Symantec Intelligence report covers more than just spam rates and makes interesting, if not scary reading.  But lets not forget this is just one view of a much bigger problem, based on one companies research of its own clients.

While there is no doubt that law enforcement operations have dented the problem of UCE, measuring global spam volumes is “challenging” according to Andrew Conway, a research analyst at security company Cloudmark who have also just released their Cloudmark Q2 Global Threat Report.

diet pill spam volume source cloudmarkSince April 27 Cloudmark has seen a 79% reduction in diet pill spam as the result of FTC action against a California corporation, Sale Slash, LLC  but even that is only a part of the story.  The report details just how much money the spammers made – staggering! – go read.

Cloudmark’s research could also indicate the shape of things to come in the war on spam by outlining an “inverse relationship between the cost of registering the domain and the amount of abuse“.  There is also an interesting finding on the use of new “reputable” TLD’s and the use of URL shorteners.

Fighting Spam

Talking of fighting spam, Sri Harsha Somanchi a Product Manager at GMail  announced a new service Gmail Postmaster Tools   to help support “the senders of wanted mail” get their messages to their customers.  In the blog post ‘The mail you want, not the spam you don’t‘ he also announced; “we are bringing the same intelligence developed for Google Search and Google Now to make the spam filter smarter“, it now uses “an artificial neural network to detect and block the especially sneaky spam“.

So back to ‘has the spam rate really dropped?’

We think not.  We base our assumption on other research from Cisco that we consider to be a better reflection of global email volumes.  After all, they are network people and would therefore have a wider view.

How big is the spam problem?

  • Last week over 184 Billion emails were sent globally.
  • Last week just 13.46% of those emails (24.89 Billion) were NOT spam.
  • (that means there were over 159 Billion spam emails sent last week)
  • While 0.0067% were classed as malware.

average daily email volumes

Do you think spam you get has reduced?

Did you know how many spam emails get sent every day?

As a responsible email marketer will Gmail’s Postmaster Tools help you?

Feel free to share your thoughts and this post.

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6 thoughts on “Spam email volumes drop to 11 year low … really?”

  1. Hmmm… very interesting read and somewhat good news.

    The only problem is my email box tells me something entirely different. I really feel that SPAM has actually increased greatly, and it also seems that the technology Spammers use are more advanced now. They seem to have email addresses that self-liquidate/self-destruct, and they’re also able to send emails which look as though it was sent by a friend – even with a friend’s name. CRAZY DAYS!!!

    Anyways, i hope for the best… SPAM really has to stop!

    Reply
    • Hi Donald, thanks for your comment.

      I have to agree that the tech that spammers have available does make life simpler for them but … the industry is doing lots to combat the issues of spoofing, phishing and lets not forget viruses and malware … or the responsibility of us end-users to protect ourselves.

      Personally I don’t think spam will ever stop. And lets not get in to what spam actually is … like beauty, it’s in the eye of the recipient 🙂

      Reply
    • Hey Emilio, great point and with the high profile data thefts in the last 12 months alone, it shows that no-one should feel safe.

      Reply

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