Spam Rate Drops Below 50%

Spam has dropped to its lowest rate in twelve years? I haven't really noticed a difference, do you feel like you are getting less spam?

According to the latest Symantec Intelligence Report, the overall spam rate has dropped to 49.7 percent, the first time a figure this low has been recorded since September 2003. Phishing rates and email-based malware were also down this month. It's not all good news though as there were 57.6 million new malware variants created in June, up from 44.5 million pieces of malware created in May and 29.2 million in April.

sounds like bull shit

I think it has just migrated to other mediums (since their statistic is for email only) ... I see SPAM in IMs to my phone, to Skype, and to other media like Facebook ... I suspect that if you look at it in aggregate it is the same or higher (just not all in email anymore)

over 600 a day on my yahoo accounts

Spam? What spam?

I get one maybe every two months that slips past Gmail's filters. I've not had a false positive in over a year, so I don't count the drivel that gets shoveled my way. There could be one or one million--so long as Google stops it it makes no difference to me.

Gmail does a great job at filtering them. I get one per month max. And I'm talking about my crap email that is used everywhere...

My spam rate would be almost 0% if it weren't for all of the data breaches (Adobe, Target, etc). I got far less spam before that happened.

Yeah, I rarely see any spam nowadays.

I will give them that maybe less is making its way into inboxes, but I think Just as much if not more is still being sent out.

Exavior said:

I will give them that maybe less is making its way into inboxes, but I think Just as much if not more is still being sent out.

Click to expand...

I doubt that is how they calculate this. They surely calculate it as all spam. Otherwise these numbers wouldn't make any sense.

What is most likely happening is a combination of effects that all are making it pointless to send spam. 1 spam filters over the years have become pretty good at taking out spam without taking out legitimate emails. So most users don't see 99% of the spam and don't have to go fishing through their spam folders for good stuff. Second nearly everyone has been on the internet who is going to get on it for a decent while now. So people are probably just better at spotting spam now and better at not responding to it as often. So less and less spammers are interested in trying because it ends up being a fruitless waste of time that says a lot given how easy and cheap it is to send emails. On top of that now days tons of people communicate a lot more through standard social media outlets and a lot of advertising is just moving over to that venue.

I run two spam filters, I've had one spam message in the last year. Spam is dead to me now.

Based on what is hitting our servers for lots and lots of mail users? No, it's not even remotely decreasing. It might look like that though. I'd have to say that for low publicity addresses, the amount of spam has dropped. For high publicity addresses it is off the hook. If your server host a domain(s) with a lot of high publicity addresses, it is also heavily targeted in general regardless of legit matching addresses (i.e. our servers get a lot of random TO: values targeted as well that we wind up just dropping on the floor).

Some of my personal email addresses are >10 years old and are pretty public. They get targeted like nobody's business. My work address is not very public at all, and gets about 1300 pieces of spam a week that I could easily drop on the floor if I wanted to, but settings that supported that applied globally would make the folks with published high publicity addresses lose massive amounts of legit mail.

I think more people feel that unsolidated porn in the email in-box is not spam.

Agreed on the Gmail. Smooth sailing here.