Three Life Certainties: Death, Taxes & Spam

The old statement of life’s certainties has been updated to now include email spam with death and taxes.

No matter how hard big business and Governments try they just aren’t making any progress in the battle against email spam.

According to the Web site trustedsource.org, there were a total of 154.3 billion mail messages sent around the world Sunday and 117.4 billion of them were spam. For those of you without a calculator, this means that 76 percent of those e-mail messages were spam. That’s slightly below Symantec’s recent monthly spam report, which claimed that on average 78.5 percent of e-mail messages are spam. Maybe Sunday was a slow day.

Remember a few years ago when industry and political leaders were trying to find a way to eliminate spam at its source? Congress passed the “Can-Spam Act,” while Microsoft filed suit against 15 global spammers. Meanwhile, the security industry was actively trying to address spam at the technology level by establishing reputation services and tweaking domain name system services. Worthy efforts that haven’t paid off. via

At the moment I’m using SpamBully which isn’t too bad but has a few glitches that annoy me such as freezing Outlook Express until it scans all incoming mail. This may sound trivial but it can be really annoying when you want to pop open OE and instantly send an email without having to wait for SpamBully to plough it’s way through all my incoming mail, most of which is spam.

As you’ll see from this screencap of stats for this month, I’ve recieved 3245 emails of which only 374 were confirmed as good. So 2831 attempts have been made to sell me a cheap watch, help me enlarge my penis without surgery, restore my bank account to normal or introduce me to the woman of my dreams.

I’ll stick with this program for the time being but when my years’ subscription expires I’ll be looking for something else. What that is going to be I’ve no idea.

The man who comes up with an easy to use and install antispam software application that actually works could very well become as rich as Bill Gates. Companies such as Symantec will never win this battle. They showed their true colours when they removed the spam filter application from Norton Internet Security, it’s now an add-on, which of course costs more money.