Spam now accounts for 90.4 percent of all e-mail, according to a report released Monday from security vendor Symantec. This means that 1 out of every 1.1 e-mails is junk. The report also notes that spam shot up 5.1 percent just from April to May.
Report: Spam now 90 percent of all e-mail

"Spammers using better-known and thus more widely trusted Web sites to host malware is reminiscent of the spammers who rely on well-known Web mail and social networking environments to host spam content," said Paul Wood, Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst.

Where you live also determines when you're spammed, says the report. For people in the U.S., spam hits its peak between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. and then drops overnight. Europeans get a solid stream of spam throughout the day, while users in Asia-Pacific countries find most spam waiting for them in the morning. One reason for this trend, says the report, is that most spammers are at their busiest during U.S. working hours.

The popular CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) program, which asks the user to type in a series of random characters, is no longer proving as effective as once hoped ... criminals have now succeeded in generating profiles with random names, apparently by using automated CAPTCHA breakers. The report notes that some major Web sites are now exploring other ways to block automated accounts, such as using photographic images that a user must analyze.

Spam levels had dropped for a short while last year after the closure of several malware-hosting Internet providers. But spammers have since bounced back from those losses by rebuilding their networks.

On the other hand, electronic spam is neither as destructive, expensive (unless you are a sucker for the absurd schemes they offer) or invasive as the hard copy stuff that comes through my real-world mailbox everyday. I saw some data a while back that suggested less than 20% of what gets delivered to the house is something I actually want.

What about you? Is the spam swallowing your internet or have you perfected the filter and worn out the delete key?

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