Less Than 3% Of Email Is Not Spam
09/16/2007 Post By: Andrew Kamphuis
It's a sad world. Email is broken. There so much spam out there. On Friday and today, I've been running some statistics on the different services we offer, and their usage, etc. Our spam appliance which reviews hundreds of thousands of emails a week (and is highly effective) rejects over 97% of all the email passed through it. In fact, it is blocking in one form or another 97.2% of all mail sent to it.
Here is a small breakdown:
- 33% of mail is rejected because a recipient doesn't exist (so a spammer is conducting a dictionary attack and just sending mail to conceivable address).
- 47% is outright spam content. (Viagra based ads, etc)
- Just over 0.1% of email contains a virus.
- 17% of mail is tagged as questionable spam (our content filtering allows users to set different levels of content filter, and this 17% isn't outright rejected, but rather quarantined for a user)
I know for the hundreds of emails I receive a day, the spam appliance does an excellent job. It's just sad that there are so many spammers out there.
yepI realize that I put email address on alot of websites, and that spammers eat that stuff up, and that is a cause of alot of the spam I personally receive, but really... if it's not effective why do spammers keep sending mail through.
If you aren't using spam filtering - how do you survive?
Add a comment
