How spam did in the first half of 2007

Sep 6, 2007 10:52 GMT  ·  By

A recent study done by BitDefender experts shows us that spam messages have seriously outnumbered normal mail activity. I guess you have noticed that as well, I know I sure did - out of 10 messages I got, about 6 or 7 were crap.

In the first six months most spam was actually image spam, a fact which only seems natural to me, since it's the most efficient method of them all. As for the content, 75% of spam was stock share related. That's three quarters, wow! "Buy-cheap-and-stupid-drugs-that-have-no-effect" spam came second with only 8.1% while knockoff goods sales came in third. Porn related spam has been ranked 6th with only 2% of the total spam messages. In other terms, porn got squashed, I guess the spammers finally realized that people are more interested in making money fast than in masturbating. Boy, aren't they clever?

Pornography related spam was not amongst the top 10 subjects while talking about text spam where drug related messages came in first and second. You can view the full study on BitDefender's website, in case you are interested.

Is spam really annoying you? Well, here's some stuff you can do to get rid of it. For one thing, don't post your e-mail on forums, or any other website. Malicious users have been known to have programs that scan the Internet for e-mail addresses. They can't spam you, if they don't know your address! That is one hell of a good measure, unless, of course, they hack into a database and steal your e-mail address from there.

Another good thing is to report spam as soon as you get it, so that e-mail clients can properly flag spammers. Also, you can deploy spam-filters and use blacklists to keep unwanted messages out of your Inbox!