Spammers in a More Giving Mood This Holiday Season By: Jason Hahn - Topic: Email - Date: November 23, 2006

The holiday season brings a lot of things: family gatherings, food coma, pretty snow scenes, and, of course, gifts.  But the one thing that e-mail users should be noticing more and more is that there is something missing from that list: massive amounts of spam.

The reason for this is clear enough.  As consumers struggle to think of ideas for gifts and shop at more frequent rates than at any other time of the year, spammers see the need and look to fill it by sending out amounts of spam that they hope will match that need.  It’s a simple supply and demand framework, and spammers think that they are part of the supply, though a lot of people would disagree.

This year, however, will see unparalleled loads of spam being pushed towards inboxes, according to anti-spam companies.

Holiday season decorations were seen early this year, even before Halloween, and it seems that spammers followed suit.

According to information released by IronPort Systems, 63 billion junk messages were sent each day in October, on average, which was a dramatic increase from last year’s 31 billion daily rate.  IronPort also expects that there will be 78 billion spam messages sent per day in December, which is also a striking jump from last year’s 38 billion rate.

MessageLabs added to this by reporting that 88.7% of all e-mails sent in October were unwanted, and that this number is expected to reach 90% in November and December.

All of these spam messages put huge strains on bandwidth.  According to IronPort, in October, spam sent around the globe amounted to 819 terabytes per day in data, which was a huge increase from last year’s 275 terabytes per day in data.

To add to this, there is a huge economic cost for all the time that is spent deleting spam.  According to the National Technology Readiness Survey, spam message deletion cost the economy $21.6 billion in 2004.

ISPs and companies that hope to nullify spam’s ill effects are trying their best to do their part, but even the best of them still allow 1-2% of all spam through to inboxes.  With the insanely huge amounts of spam being sent each day, this percentage translates into an insanely large number of spam messages costing the economy billions of dollars each year.

Spammers have found success in simplicity when it comes to dodging e-mail filters.  E-mails that contain only text oftentimes include key words that are misspelled to confuse spam filters, and e-mails that contain only a single image make it difficult for spam filters to see the message in the image.

All of this amounts to a big, costly problem with no definitive solution in sight.  The holiday season only highlights the dilemma, as spammers look to take advantage of consumers looking for gift ideas and deals.

It’s just a shame that you can’t re-gift spam.

Source:

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