CNET reports,
There was a time – 2004 to be precise – when spam “only” consumed 70 percent of all e-mail. Those were the good old days. Today, as Barracuda Networks’ annual spam report shows, upwards of 95 percent of all e-mail is spam.
Personally I think those numbers are skewed. Barracuda is a professional provider of spam blocking, and their customers are businesses that can afford to install a dedicated machine for spam filtering. We had one at Funcom. Me on the other hand, I don’t have one of those. And at least judging from myself, I’m less likely to enter my home email address into a form than my work email.
Still, 95% is insane. Spam processing is probably the major part of what my server is doing. About 2-3 of them every day make it through my SpamAssassin and end up getting filtered by the Thunderbird rules or myself. Some years ago I set up an automated process that takes the Junk folder on my IMAP server and teaches it to SpamAssassin so that it learns from the mistakes it made, so I’m staying ahead of the deluge.
Could everybody please stop buying from these people so they give up?