With it being the holiday season, it’s understandable that spammers are going to launch everything they can to see what works.  Which is unfortunate since that means more and more of these emails will get past junk mail filters, meaning you have to manually remove them yourself.  Just brace yourself for it, since it will probably happen through New Years (people have resolutions and of course, spammers want to ‘help’ people achieve them…)

Spam continues to plague the average computer user, with up to 95 percent of all e-mail traffic consisting of unsolicited e-mails, according to a study from Web security vendor Barracuda Networks.

Barracuda analyzed more than one billion e-mail messages sent to its 50,000 customers, and found that 90 to 95 percent of all e-mail sent in 2007 was spam, up from 85 to 90 percent last year.

That number has been on the rise since 2001, when spam accounted for only 5 percent of e-mail traffic. In 2004, the year that Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act, spam was 70 percent of all e-mail, Barracuda said.

In a separate poll of 261 business professionals, Barracuda also found that 57 percent of respondents viewed spam as the worst form of junk advertising, while 31 percent cited postal junk mail and 12 percent selected telemarketing.[more]

Tags: Spam