Simplify your business
Monday, 13 October 2008 10:32 pm

More spam than legit email? You betcha!

Friday, 20 April 2007  

Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica quotes an IDC report that predicts this is the year where spam will for the first time outnumber real email. I have no idea how the folks at IDC came to that conclusion but looking at our own ISP’s internal statistics, that’s already happened well before this year.

The summary below, based on the last 360,000 messages, shows that the overwhelming majority of message traffic is worthless garbage:

REJECTED OUTRIGHT:
 
81.80%
ACCEPTED BUT FLAGGED AS SPAM:
 
3.85%
ACCEPTED OUTRIGHT:
 
14.35%

That’s around 6 spam emails for every legit message! While most of the dreck never makes it into our ISP’s users mailboxes, mainly due to effective spam filtering, it’s still a heinous waste of bandwitdh, storage and human time.

Posted in Email, Law, Marketing by Ivan
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 two comments:

  1. Miha - Wednesday, 6 June 2007 6:31 pm  

    Interesting ratio. It's also a bit scary and may suggest that email is surely but steadily becoming less and less useful. I remember it described as a "killer application" some years ago.

    On a side note, how do you do those bar charts of yours? I noticed them on a few of your posts and was just wandering if you actually hand-code them every time you want to plot something? Or is it some sort of plugin?

  2. Ivan - Saturday, 9 June 2007 9:18 am  

    It's not a plugin but rather a PHP-CLI script which generates the HTML output based on data passed as an argument. I'll offer the source code in an upcoming post.


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