Spam has spread from people's inboxes into the news. The Economist has an article on the subject this week, and though their coverage of anti-spam measures is poor, they include an interesting graph that shows spam rapidly approaching 50% of all email.
I'd say 50% is about right for my work email, where I get 100-200 messages a day, about half of which are spam. But my personal email box sees a lot less legitimate traffic, so spam ends up accounting for perhaps 95% of mail arriving there.
At home I use Mail for Mac OS X (10.2), which has a built-in spam filter that takes out 90% of my spam and diverts only about 1% of messages that I actually want to see. For my mum, I have Razor set up on the server side (courtesy of our wonderful new hosts, DreamHost) and she reports similar levels of success. Here's an article about other software that's out there. And for those with an artistic bent, it's also possible to stop spam with poetry.
But spam also has to be choked off at source, which is why it's good to hear that some powerful people are going after the offenders.
And if you just want to laugh about it instead of cry, check out these two pieces.
Posted by timo at April 27, 2003 09:12 PM | TrackBack