Spam now 60% of Emails

October 11th, 2004

Spam is now 60% of Emails, according to recent measures.

Bulk unsolicited emails account for over 60 per cent of all email traffic on the internet, according to the Office of Fair Trading. That is up from under half in 2003 and under 10 per cent in 2001.

Kinda makes me wonder if we should start just referring to email as “spam” — since it’s now the majority of what it is used for.

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  • http://www.silverstripe.com Sam

    The crucial point that a lot of these statistics miss is this: users don’t give a damn about e-mail traffic on the internet, they care about the e-mail that actually gets into the box.
    Given that spam-filters are reasonably widespread now, I would say that the amount of spam that actually ends up in peoples inboxes is a significantly lower figure, and a more useful indicator of spam’s disruption.
    Anecdotally, since switching to Thunderbird spam hasn’t affected my life at all.
    Sure, you can argue that the network gets clogged with all these spams, but 1 MP3 is the same amount of data as 1,000 spams, especially since images are usually linked rather than attached, for tracking purposes. I’d wager that for a typical network link, spam accounts for a very small percentage of the total traffic.

  • Sergei

    It’s interesting…
    If we imagine spam as a neural messages in global mind-network, what would it be?
    What kind of message spam is?
    what kind of activity (behavior?) it produces??
    Most of spam are “penis engargement” “herbal viagra” “lower your taxes” “university diplomas” -like style…
    What kind of behaviour it produces ? …

  • http://novaspivack.typepad.com Nova

    Interesting question, I guess. I’m not sure that there is a particular behavior, for me, that is consistent with both “penis enlargement” and “lower your taxes” and “university diplomas” — but hey, if that’s what turns you on, I guess it’s ok!!! :^)

  • sergei

    >if that’s what turns you on, I guess it’s ok!!!
    interesting context ;)
    did i say anything about “turning on” ? you go first ;) ) so i’m unsure of your real behavior ;)
    actually, behaviour i mentioned earlier, is behavior of “mass consciousness”, not personal
    that’s the question: can this kind of broadcast messages produce changes in society’s consciusness and behavior?