Why does it seem like I'm getting more spam recently?Over the past few months there has been a huge world-wide increase in the amount of spam on the internet. "The Register" reports that spam increased 30% in September and October, and that new sources of spam tripled between June and October. Even if our spam filter blocked 99.9% of all spam, if the amount of spam triples, then we all see three times as much spam in our mailbox. 98% of incoming mail to our servers is blocked as spam/virus/malware or has a spam score over 4. Of the remaining 2%, much of that is blocked by local mail filters, or deleted manually as spam. Spam often comes in waves, with huge increases when spammers develop a new technique to get through spam filters or find a new product to sell. There can be local increases, for example one or two cracked computers within the Penn community can increase the amount of spam that we see. More information about the recent spam increase: Another War We're Not Winning: Us vs Spam (O'Reilly) |