Russia and China 'behind current spam deluge'

[Julio Franco]

As hardcore criminals step up their spamming, experts believe that nine out of 10 of all e-mails may soon be unsolicited junk.

Organised criminals based in Russia are fuelling the rise in the amount of spam sent over the Internet, according to a leading opponent of junk mail.

Steve Linford, director of The Spamhaus Project, warned on Tuesday that these gangs are supplying US-based spammers with details of compromised PCs that can be used to send out their unsolicited commercial messages, and creating viruses that will create more of these open proxies.

Read more: ZDNet.

 

[Bearcat]

9 out of 10 emails is reality

Heh, this story caught my eye. I have an email filtering program called POPFile that has done a pretty good job at sorting what I want from the tremendous amount of SPAM I receive. It keeps pretty detailed statistics on the email I receive through my University of Cincinnati email account, which is my primary address. Thought I'd share some with you:

Since August 23 of 2003:
*POPFile has classified 27,407 messages (not including those classifed on my laptop, which POPFile does not count).
*POPFile has achieved a 99.3% accuracy rating at classifying the email I receive into the correct folder (or bucket in the terminology of the program)
*92.57% of the email I receive is SPAM! That is 25,371 spam messages in roughly 291 days, resulting in an average of around 87 junk messages per day!

This is absolutely crazy folks...

 

[nowpc2]

The company I work for makes email filtering products. Each of the products track the number of inbound and outbound messages and the percentage of spam and virus messages.

Most of our clients see about 60% of their email as spam and 1% to 5% are viruses.

These numbers get larger every month it seems.

 

[Vehementi]

Of course it's the communist countries we blame on all this mess

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Not only...

While it's Russia who's supplying the compromised pc's, it's americans who's doing the spamming....

So you might say it's the (previous) "commie bastards" working with the "capital dogs" to deliver you the latest adverticement for porn, viagra and other prescription based medicines....

 

[Akio]

How did they ever come up with the word SPAM? I mean it's also a food. But did they use it for Junk E-Mail first?

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Nope.

SPAM as in the canned food came way before it was used for email.

And nothing bugs Netters more than spam. So how did we come to refer to that bane of all e-mail users as "spam"? According to Hormel's Spam Web site, it came from one of the skits of the British comedy troupe Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which a group of Vikings patronize a restaurant where every dish comes accompanied with Spam (Spam being, of course, SPiced hAM, made by Hormel Foods). The Vikings get carried away and sing a rousing chorus of "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam," drowning out all other conversation.

I found that here... It has some interesting anecdotes

 

[Akio]

Hahaha! Okay, thanks for that.