For the first time in twelve years, email spam is 50% down and, while it’s a small victory, it still counts. It could mean that spammers have seen the light and decided to walk the right path, but it’s much more unlikely than security systems working harder and harder each year to improve everyone’s email experience.
Perhaps some might’ve noticed it and some didn’t, but there is a significantly less amount of spam in your inbox than there was last year. The occasional pyramid scheme and advertisement for enlargement pills might still pop up, along with unknown bank accounts overflowing with money waiting for you to claim, but no one is perfect.
Nevertheless, the 49.7% of emails being marked as spam is an excellent statistic, which means that security systems might be on the right path to eliminating them altogether in the future. Symantec reported that out of the 704 billion emails sent last month, only 353 billion were unwanted spam.
That might still seem like a vast amount of junk mail sent out. After its peak in June 2009, when 5.7 trillion out of the 6.3 trillion emails were marked as unwanted, the spam virtual pandemic has been decreasing slowly.
Such a low in unsolicited messages has not been seen since September 2013, and it shows that spam filtering is gradually improving. It was only last week when Google’s email service, Gmail, has launched their Postmaster Tool and promised that it will show significant results in fighting off junk mail. They were right.
And they’re not the only ones doing the internet a favor by working to make things better for everyone. Microsoft has also been working strenuously in partnership with law enforcements to slam down the lid on botnets.
Symantec’s reports also observed that spam rates are indirectly proportional to the size of the organization sending them. Smaller companies, defined as having between 1 and 500 employees, are much more likely to crowd your inbox with unwanted junk mail.
Bigger enterprises have a smaller spam rate. According to Symantec, the mining industry is currently in the lead with 56% rate of unsolicited ad messages, with manufacturing at 53.7% on second place, and construction standing close with retail on third place at 53%.
Spam messaging is not only a matter of annoyance, but of security as well as there are many possible breaches waiting for one click. Possibly in direct response, malware-attackers are also enhancing their methods with 57.6 million new versions created in June alone. Thus, the fight continues.
Image source: trendmicro.com
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