10 things you should know about fighting spam

Overview:

Understanding a few key facts about how spam fits into the IT landscape will help you marshal the necessary resources to combat it. This list offers a look at a selection of interesting details about spam.

Spam is one of the biggest problems facing e-mail administrators and their users, so it's no surprise that there are a lot of spam-fighting tools out there. But along with those tools, you need to know a few things about spam itself. In an effort to help you 'know the enemy,' IT pro Josh Hoskins collected various facts about spam, such as:

• No one is sure how to combat spam. 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.


• 73 percent of total Internet e-mail is spam. A study conducted by Industry Canada showed that in 2004, 73 percent of all Internet e-mail was spam. This leads to approximately 2.5 Terabytes of spam e-mail being sent every day.


• 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. You can be sure that if there's money to be made, the increase will continue.

(Is this item miscategorized? Does it need more tags? Let us know.)