Spam Could Kill E-Mail
Source: Information Week
Spam is increasing at such an alarming rate that people may stop relying on E-mail to communicate, according to E-mail security firm Postini, which says spam volume jumped some 150% in 2002.
In another danger signal, the percentage of messages sent to Postini's clients identified as spam climbed from just 20% in January 2002 to more than 60% in December.
Postini, which processes 40 million messages daily for more than 800 businesses and Internet service providers, 60% of spam messages it's intercepting are special offers or promotions; 20% are bulk mail; 12% are "get-rich-quick" schemes; and 10% have sexually explicit content.
All of it drags down employees' productivity, overloads their E-mail infrastructure, and can cause serious legal and human-resource problems, says Maurene Kaplan Grey, an analyst with Gartner. "Postini's numbers are pretty accurate," she says. "I have no reason to doubt them and lots of reasons to believe them."
Other E-mail content-filtering firms, she says, show similar numbers. "Spam is easily 30%, 40% of total enterprise mail volume."
"These are healthy statistics," says Scott Petry, Postini's VP of products and engineering and the company's founder. "But not on the good side. We're shocked, frankly, at the increase. If you do the growth curve, E-mail will shortly follow Usenet" into disuse.
