Less Evil, Still Annoying: 92% of Emails are Spam

usually get half-baked World of warcraft phishing scams.

Come on... I know that blizzard didn't purchase wow-blizzardbattle-passwordchange.net

For those of you business owners out there, you can thank the spammers for the costs of implementing and maintaining a secure email system. Helps keep your IT providers in business at least :-/

92%, that definitely and A- for effort! Way to go spammers. You will make the Harvard Dean's list in no time@

"Congratulations, you have won a free MacBook Pro from Facebook!
Sent by: noreply@milliyet.com.tr"

Yeah, sure.

Tell that too all the facebook and battle.net fakes I've gotten in the past 2 months

i guess that's one way to create job in this economy , right ?

Still thinking about investing with that Bank of Nigeria. I'm kidding.

I can hook you up with a friend of mine who got in touch a while back. He has several squillion dollars tied up in holding because his family was wiped out in one fell swoop. He just needs €5,000 to free up his funds and then he's going to split it with me. Wanna go halfsies? Surely it's much more reliable than investing.

from how many emails I get about erectile disfunction, the entire country must be undergoing an epidemic, or overflow of placebos.

If I had said yes to all of the spam emails I have gotten, I would be $20mil richer, own about 3 countries, 50 iPods, and have a penis stemming from here to Massachusetts!

Perhaps spam could be reduced if countries agreed that a spammer whom is caught is to be publicly hanged, drawn and quartered. Then the parts are to be gibbeted.

My daily average is 8. I have 6 and counting for today, though. Should be an interesting day. Love gmail for keeping me from ever seeing any of these unless I want to.

Is it really so hard to legislate against it?

The food company SPAM must really enjoy all these free publicity news.
If only 92% of consumers eat SPAM!

With all these numbers floating around, does anyone realize how much bandwidth is being used every second to send this sh!t? How much power is being used to virus scan each message? I could probably put money on it that the next time you visit Tom's Hardware and it takes more than 10 seconds to load, SPAM caused the delay.

A friend of mine gets around 250 spam messages a day, only because she hands her email out to anyone who asks ie stores, forums, the like. I on the other hand get 2 every month out of 300+ emails. Its just common sense don't hand it out and you'll be fine.

kill the spam!!

Tax email

I don't usually get any in my main email accounts. Maybe one spam email per month max. My Gmail junk account on the other hand goes through spike periods of 10-20 spam emails a week and then nothing (or next to nothing) for a few weeks.

As bad as this sounds, this should, in theory, actually solve the problem. Obviously though, this is not likely to happen and I certainly wouldn't want to pay taxes on email.

Another problem with this approach--or any legislative or legal approach--is that with approximately 238 geopolitical entities in the world the chances of all of them agreeing on this is zero. Spammers will just camp in the country or countries that don't care or don't enforce it.

I guess on the whole I'd prefer more spam that was less dangerous, since (almost) all the spam gets filtered out in Gmail anyway

Is it really getting less malicious? Or is the General Spam getting to be so high, that the "malicious" percentage has gone down? Because the percentage decrease may not actually correspond with the actual number of malicious emails.

I constantly get WoW, Facebook, Bank of America (and other banks), UK Lottery, my long lost dead uncle who owned an oil business and died in a plane accident phishing emails on an hourly basis on my 'junk email'. And I'm not talking my junk folder, I'm talking the email address I use to register for online forums.

So what's the good spam? Are they the ones that let you get hooked up?

...and it will continue, as long as it is treated like a game. A spammer who is convicted should be put down; guilt may be appealed, but not the sentence. GAME OVER.

I love the "you win a $ billion dollars!! CHACHIGN!!" emails

I ROFLed !!!

While my mom was in the hospital last month, I decided to keep her inbox tidy. If there was an email I didn't know was spam, or knew explicitly wasn't, but was still not sure if she wanted, I called her. Everything else was either filed away in her folders or sent off to the recycle bin. Still, imagine my amazement when I discovered 90% of her spam consisted of advertisements for Viagra.

Well 92% is a pretty close match to the percentage of junk mail I receive through traditional postal services. About 7% is bills and other dull stuff. The last 1% is the stuff I actually care about.

If it wasn't so easy to spread malicious crap electronically I would just shrug because the virtual world had mirrored the real world. At least via my traditional mailbox the only toxic items I have received recently are from the local political candidates...

How much spam? About none. Seriously, I follow all the rules... I have a Windows Live mail account for places that I do not trust, which gets all my spam. Those that I know are good, such as bank, nice forums, I use my real info. I also keep my email adress hidden, or something like "Real!lyfor!male!mail@Gma!il.com, remove the things that don't belong"

not much, I never go in for advertising lure.

I've had several family members die in plane crashes (different years, same location), all of whom were rich. I don't know why the Bank of Congo thinks they have the right to give me some of my dead family members' money but keep the rest, but they said they want to split it.

I also don't know how Mr. Kabir Hakam of the bank in Burkina Faso got a request from me to release $16M US from a random deceased customer into my account.