Spam Volume Jumps 35% In November

[HardOCP News]

If you’ve noticed an extra helping of spam in your inbox lately, it isn’t your imagination. Spam volume jumped 35% last month to an average of 85 billion messages a day. Wow.

"There's been a huge increase in spam volume," says David Mayer, a product manager at IronPort Systems, "from 31 billion spams a day on average in October 2005 to 63 billion in October 2006. But in November, we saw two surges that averaged 85 billion messages a day, one from Nov. 13 to 22, the other from Nov. 26 to 28.

 

[jmackay]

I can't believe action isn't being taken against all these spammers... Is there anything we can do besides sent it to our junk boxes?

 

[HardOCP News]

Well, my idea is too extreme.

I say that we should cut off the stream at the source. Make it illegal to use spam to sell ANYTHING. If your product is being sold via spam...screw trying to track down the spammer...fine the company USING spam.

That dries up the money, eventually spammers dry up.

My other idea was public executions...that didn't fly either.

 

[Terillius]

I wonder who counted all those messages? Who counted mine? Somehow I think that statistic is incredibly inaccurate.

 

[Lazybones]

I saw the jump in my systems as well.. Most of it was still filtered but the volume was huge.

 

[Riddlinkidstoner]

Well, my idea is too extreme.

I say that we should cut off the stream at the source. Make it illegal to use spam to sell ANYTHING. If your product is being sold via spam...screw trying to track down the spammer...fine the company USING spam.

That dries up the money, eventually spammers dry up.

My other idea was public executions...that didn't fly either.

Can't. People make too much money either A) taxing it B) stopping it C) selling it.

 

[Martyr]

i have see alot just this year. i worked in a corp enviroment this summer, got so many of those stupid stock emails it was a joke. the uw email system seems alot more robust, i maybe get a couple a month. my cousin who goes to mich state gets like 10-20 a day.

 

[shadowwyvern]

Somewhere once I read an interesting way of stopping spam: just have the pop/smtp (or maybe a new protocol) servers give their clients large computational problems to solve before forwarding the mail. Although it might take a machine, say, only 3-5 seconds to solve it, it would have to be done for every message, which would shut down spammers trying to send 100k messages a day. That's just the concept, obviously it would need tweaking, but it could serve as another layer of protection.

 

[TheGeekFreek]

Spam, flat out, should be illegal.. It shoulda require a 10,000$ license, and you shoulda have to DIRECTLy say "Yes, I want spam from this company".. not this BS about "Yeah, we may give your info to other people"...

I cant believe spamming isnt illegal.. What happened to the gool ole days a lynching assholes via MobRule