Will email survive spam?
Today I saw a report that yesterday the machines which process email external to the UW handled a record 2.1 million messages (in one day!), and that our spam detection software scored 65% of those messages as having a 50% or greater possibility of being spam.
That means, if we take it as a given that those messages scored greater than 50% really are spam, that we processed 1.36 million spam messages in one day. In one day. That's more than fifteen spam messages per second all day long.
The implications of this activity when multiplied on a global scale are staggering.
My organization (an engineering consulting firm dealing in civil and environment engineering) is seeing similar percentages for mail sent to legitimate recipients, and even higher overall.
That is, 75-80% of inbound messages to our domain are directory phishing attempts.
Of those messages addresses to legitimate addresses, 40-50% are spam of 80% liklihood or higher.
On my personal accounts, I get more spam than I get legitimate messages - and that's with server-side and client-side filters.
Think of the bandwidth costs of all those messages. Think of the dollars that corporations and institutions spend on filtering technologies.