10 Things To Know About Fighting Spam

Spam is one of the biggest problems facing e-mail users and administrators. All email users need to know a few key facts about spam. For more information, see How To...  Fight Spam, Top 10 Spam Scams, What UC is doing about spam and Spam filtering (Including how to set up your own spam filters!)

1. Spam works
   The reason you receive so much unwanted e-mail is simply that it is an effective form of advertising. If spam were not effective, it would have died off soon after being invented. But as you can tell by the number of unwanted messages in your inbox, it's flourishing.
2. Spam is a business
   Spam is a form of advertising, no different from telemarketers or junk mailers - and it's a very cost effective form of advertising, too. E-mailing 10,000 people costs a fraction of what it would cost to call or mail 1,000 people. Such low overhead allows a much wider audience to be reached, and only a tiny percentage needs to respond to make a profit.

3. Video	Games

   Many users think they can stop spam by unsubscribing
   Many spam e-mails contain a link to unsubscribe . Knowledgeable users know this is nothing but a way to confirm working e-mail addresses, but many more users do not. Clicking this link has been shown to increase spam by more than 85 percent, while replying to the e-mail with a request to unsubscribe has been shown to increase spam by a staggering 192 percent.
4. Some people like spam
   As scary as this may sound, it's true. Some people love any form of communication sent to them. Although these people are (thankfully) few and far between, they are out there.
5. We don't yet have a really effective way to fight spam.
   There are many efforts currently underway to try to help. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is getting involved. Microsoft supports an anti-framework technology called Sender ID. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is gaining popularity among the open source crowd. AOL and Yahoo just announced a pay per e-mail scheme. And Bayesian filters are starting to appear in e-mail clients. Which, if any of these, will be an overall solution to spam is unknown. But even as these technologies are being adopted...
6. 73 percent of total internet e-mail is spam
   A study conducted by Industry Canada showed that in 2005, 73 percent of all Internet e-mail was spam. This leads to approximately 2.5 Terabytes of spam e-mail being sent every day.
7. Spam is usually smaller than a normal e-mail (60K versus 6K)
   One fact about spam that's often overlooked is size. The number of messages is staggering, but the average spam e-mail is only 1/10 the size of a normal e-mail. This makes that 2.5 TB of daily spam all the more amazing.
8. The amount of spam being sent is growing
   Studies indicate that the amount of spam being sent every year is on the rise. Whereas 2005 showed the spam as 73 percent of total e-mail, 2006 is shaping up to be more than 83 percent, with nearly every month showing more than 1 percent total increase from the previous month.
9. Spam costs U.S. business over 20 billion a year
   The amount of cost businesses incur dealing with spam is astronomical. These costs appear in many ways, including increased need/use of bandwidth, lost user productivity, increased storage needs, and cost of spam fighting. A study by Vircom indicates that these factors up the average cost per mailbox to $1,400.
10. IM spam (spim) is on the rise
    Reports are showing now that one in three IM users have been targeted by IM spam. This new type of advertising went from effectively 0 percent in 2003 to nearly 5 percent of all messages in 2004 and 6 percent in 2005. You can be sure that if there's money to be made, the increase will continue.