With study after study reporting that spam is growing out of control, including this one at Search Security, one wonders that if trying to find an email ever becomes akin to trying to find a needle in a haystack, will there ever come a time when some companies simply decide to chuck out the whole email haystack.
Studies have reported an increase in spam from 60 to 120 percent in the past year. Kaye Vivian recently blogged about this recent surge, writing “My spam level is up to about 60 per day that get through my ISP, which blocks about twice that many more, and that doesn't include the 50-60 spams I get on the blog here and manually delete.”
The explosion of spam can be directly linked to outbreaks in malware, meaning that as certain viruses spread around the internet and start infecting computers, those infected computers quickly join other infected computers, typically without the owner’s knowledge, to form a vast and effective spam network.
And where spam was once the providence of fairly harmless internet marketers trying to sell you something, spam has now become one of the main focuses of organized crime, and their motives are much more disreputable. Also, the economics of spam heavily favors the spammers, as while it still costs next-to-nothing to flood email accounts with spam, for the other side, in terms of system resources and time wasted, businesses bear most of the cost.
While I believe that email is far too important a tool ever to be rendered irrelevant, I do think companies need to be especially selective about which spam engines they utilize. At Message Partners, we have found that the only way to fight back against this growing bot threat is by copying them. By that I mean as this new type of spam continuously recruits a growing army of computers to serve as spam bots, Message Partners’ believes you need to use a growing army of spam filters to thwart them. That’s why we have built a powerful email policy engine that allows you to employ any number of spam filters (from commercial to open source), and in that way utilize their different methods of finding and destroying spam.
And with spam showing no signs of slowing down, I don’t see how the war can be won any other way.
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