More than 95 Percent of All Email Is Spam

Email has been around longer than the World Wide Web, yet doesn't show any sign of slowing down or becoming obsolete despite the number of people proclaiming its end days and the number of technologies labeled as email-killers, Google Wave for one. In fact, by all accounts, email usage is going up, the only problem is that most of it is useless spam. In total, more than 95 percent of all email is blocked off as spam according to a new survey by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA).

The survey looked at 100 ISPs of various sizes from 30 countries (26 of the 27 EU Member States) totaling 80 million mailboxes and the results aren't encouraging. It found that only 4.4 percent of all email traffic is legitimate or at least labeled as such, a decrease since the previous report from the agency.

From the get-go, some 80 percent of all SMTP connections were dropped mostly because the initiators were matched to a spam blacklist, the most popular way of combating email spam. Of the 20 percent that got through, a further 80 percent got filtered out as spam using other techniques, and in the end, only a small percentage of emails got to their recipients.

That is not to say, though, that 95 percent of all email is spam and the rest is clean as no method is 100 percent accurate. Of those that got blocked, a growing number were wrongfully labeled as spam. 60 percent of those surveyed said that they had their addresses erroneously blocked.

Still, blacklisting is the most commonly used protection, followed by blocking accounts which had an unusual amount of outbound emails. Of course, the reverse is also true, of the emails that got through, a percentage clearly was spam missed by the protective measures. The complete report is available here (PDF - view in Google Docs).