More than 90% of E-Mail Found to be Spam

According to Sophos, spam is found to be widely prevalent with 92.3% of the total e-mail sent during January-March 2008 were spam. Each day Sophos analyzes millions of e-mail and the research results help to update and refine existing spam regulations.

However, in its recent research, Sophos did not try to determine the actual amount of spam making to the users' mailboxes. The United States continues to be the highest spam generating country with over 15% of mails originating from there.

Sophos forecasts that the rate of a spam would further increase as long as its authors are able to churn monetary returns from their ruses. But, if businesses ensure that spam mails are isolated and prevented from being delivered to people, they can not just save money and time, but also help to safeguard their users against e-mails that lead to malware-infected Websites.

According to new developments, spammers attempting to beat reputed filters are now trying to exploit the free services of Web mail such as Gmail, Hotmail, AIM and AOL. A recent spam campaign that notably used this method was "Canadian Pharmacy.'

Experts think that the increase in spam from Webmail might be because the spammers have learnt to bypass the CAPTCHA system of response test that determines the legitimacy of a user.

Also, spammers have been putting misleading information in their e-mails, so that they can effectively bypass e-mail filters. Since e-mail filters remove messages that originate from domains that are not existed, spammers make their e-mails appear as if they are from genuine addresses.

By finding a user's list of contact addresses and then using them in the "from" field of his e-mail, spammers get to send masses of e-mails to as many recipients as they can. But, if a spam mail is sent to a no-longer active address, it might return to that manipulated e-mail account.

However, the problem can be eradicated, if administrators arrange the settings on their e-mail servers such that they would not allow the e-mail to pass to the nonexistent user. Some ISPs like AOL have adopted this mechanism and been largely benefited.

Related article: More Requests For Better E-Mail and Spam Control

» SPAMfighter News - 5/8/2008