I currently have 208 messages in my spam folder, and spam more than 30 days old is deleted, which means that I'm getting an average of 7 spam messages a day this month. Knowing that there is just so much of it made me curious as to what type of spam there is, what methods spammers use to try and dodge email filters and what has changed in regards to spam over time, and if I'm interested in this I'll bet someone else is too. So sit back and read all about the email that everyone loves to hate, spam.
Interesting Spam Statistics
14.5 billion spam messages a day are sent, and 45% of those are considered spam. Some estimates even put that percentage as high as 73%.
The vast majority of that obscene number of spam emails can be classified as pharmaceuticals. 
These emails promise the recipient everything from better skin or effortless weight loss to improved sexual prowess. These, along with a slew of replica watches and online casino ad's, makes up almost the entirety of your spam content.
Spam by Category
Phishing and Scamming Spam
Only 0.67% of spam is a scam or a phishing attempt, but that portion is a dangerous one. Phishing works, that's why people create these scams. One of the more recent and effective phishing scams was the email from "E-Bay" telling you about the "charge to your account".
Clicking on anything in the email will immediately download a virus onto your computer, and quite a few people click without thinking when they feel like their money is on the line. Scammers know that, which means it is essential that you keep your guard up whenever you receive a suspicious email, because as internet filtration improves so do the scammers.
A Choice Spam Filtration Avoidance Technique
Image spam, as you can see in the above graph which is current to the week of my blog post, is a highly active but thankfully still fairly small portion of overall spam. Image spam is a method wherein the spam content is displayed as an image file rather than text. This is to prevent the effectiveness of text based filtration. This is interesting because as filtration improves so do the advances in image spam. There are some ad's that contain an animated image with the starting frame containing no text so that even through image analysis the spam cannot be sorted.
Fun With Spam
So, spam is complex and ofttimes dangerous, but mostly just damn annoying. There isn't much we can do about it though, spam is here to stay, so we might as well just get all the enjoyment and spamusement we can out of it.
1712
These emails promise the recipient everything from better skin or effortless weight loss to improved sexual prowess. These, along with a slew of replica watches and online casino ad's, makes up almost the entirety of your spam content.Spam by Category
Phishing and Scamming Spam
Only 0.67% of spam is a scam or a phishing attempt, but that portion is a dangerous one. Phishing works, that's why people create these scams. One of the more recent and effective phishing scams was the email from "E-Bay" telling you about the "charge to your account".
Clicking on anything in the email will immediately download a virus onto your computer, and quite a few people click without thinking when they feel like their money is on the line. Scammers know that, which means it is essential that you keep your guard up whenever you receive a suspicious email, because as internet filtration improves so do the scammers.
A Choice Spam Filtration Avoidance Technique
Image spam, as you can see in the above graph which is current to the week of my blog post, is a highly active but thankfully still fairly small portion of overall spam. Image spam is a method wherein the spam content is displayed as an image file rather than text. This is to prevent the effectiveness of text based filtration. This is interesting because as filtration improves so do the advances in image spam. There are some ad's that contain an animated image with the starting frame containing no text so that even through image analysis the spam cannot be sorted.
Fun With Spam
So, spam is complex and ofttimes dangerous, but mostly just damn annoying. There isn't much we can do about it though, spam is here to stay, so we might as well just get all the enjoyment and spamusement we can out of it.
1712
