theoldwolf

According to antivirus maker Symantec, 87 percent of e-mail traffic in the past year was spam, compared to just under 70 percent in 2008. More than 40 trillion spam messages were sent according to Symantec, which monitors about a third of the world's e-mail traffic. That's about 5,000 spam messages for every person on the planet.

More of that spam is harboring malicious software, or "malware," -- 2 percent of spam contained malware, a 900 percent increase from the previous year.

So much for the Can-Spam act... probably one of the most toothless pieces of legislation ever enacted by our mealy-mouthed "representatives". Notice those quote marks, folks. They sure as shootin' don't represent me.

If I look at the hqiz that fills up my Gmail spam folder, it pretty much follows Symantec's most recent spam report categorization:

Fortunately, Comcast (my home email provider) has fairly robust internal spam filters, so I don't see most of these. What gets through are exclusively one type of spam, where the body of the message contains nothing but an image with a link - for some reason Comcast can't seem to handle these yet. The bulk of what comes through are work-at-home scams, degree scams, açai berry scams, and the occasional Russian pharma piece.

87% of all email is spam, much of it criminal in nature, with virtually no solutions in sight. Wow... whoever could come up with a comprehensive solution to that problem would deserve the global medal of honor.