95% of email traffic is Spam

If you think you get a lot of spam, that's nothing compared to the traffic that has already been filtered out.

In 2009 the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) launched an Anti-Spam Measures survey, asking e-mail service providers in Europe about the measures they take to combat spam in their networks. This survey provides a view of how the fight against spam has evolved since the last survey two years ago, and found thatjust 4.4% of emails are legitimate. This is a tremendous waste of the embedded resources of the Internet.

The survey aimed to determine how e-mail service providers are combating spam on their networks. It helps identifying the state of the fight against spam and helps service providers to learn from their peers throughout Europe. Overall, we hope that this research will aid the industry’s understanding and development of best practices in the fight against spam.
Some of the key findings:

• less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes;
• most mail providers not only take care of protecting their customers from receiving spam, they also avoid sending spam to others;
• fighting spam has reached maturity although continuous adaptation to new techniques is needed.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fighting the SPAM War (domainmacher.com)
• Avoid email blacklisting - Outsource (brilliantthinking.net)
• How we tested the Netgear STM600 security appliance (computerworld.com)
• Could Charging Per E-Mail Beat Spam? (abcnews.go.com)