95 percent of all e-mail is UCE

This just in from How­ToWeb: a stun­ning 95 per­cent of all e-mail is unso­licited com­mer­cial e-mail.

This Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle from May details an anti-spamming effort that went awry when spam­mers retaliated.

Spam counts have con­tin­ued to rise as more e-mail admin­is­tra­tors choose pas­sive man­age­ment approaches such as fil­ter­ing. On my e-mail servers, the most obvi­ous spam is scanned, iden­ti­fied and tagged by pro­grams such as Spa­mAs­sas­sin. My servers then send the high-scoring spam directly to the trash with­out deliv­er­ing these mes­sages to an inbox. This process elim­i­nates most of my incom­ing spam.

Because I have many inter­na­tional stu­dents, I don’t fil­ter mes­sages by top-level domain, lan­guage or code pages. But many com­pa­nies do use these cri­te­ria as fil­ters. A main­land com­pany that has no Korean cus­tomers or sup­pli­ers can afford to dump any e-mail mes­sage from South Korea. That coun­try has been a pop­u­lar mail­ing point for spam mes­sages, as it offers a high con­cen­tra­tion of broad­band subscribers.

I still agree with Joi Ito’s state­ment from three years ago — e-mail is bro­ken.

Tagged as: email, Korea, malware, network, security, server, spam, USA, usability