Spam reaches record levels

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 7 Jan 2008 at 10:44

Spam reached record new levels last month, with legitimate messages accounting for less than 3% of email traffic, according to figures from SoftScan.

This increase comes despite several major arrests of spammers this year, including Robert Alan Soloway, who was dubbed the 'Spam King' in the US, and a pair of Korean programmers who were alleged to have been responsible for some 1.6 billion spam messages.

Although less business email is sent in December because of the Christmas holiday, the company believes that this is unlikely to be the reason for the record figures. This is backed up by its records for last year - in the same month in 2006 spam accounted for less than 90% of emails.

"Usually, when you look through our monthly statistics, you can quickly identify the weekends or major public holidays when there is less legitimate business email sent. In December however, except for some slightly lower levels in the first week, spam has remained consistently high throughout the month," says Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan.

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