Today McAfee released it’s quarterly threat report wherein it reports that spam is up 80% from last quarter.  This brings the spam percentage of all email to 92% by their estimation.  I liked the line in the report that says “If the economy could rebound as spam has done in second quarter, we would all be much happier with our retirement accounts.”

I recently sent a message to our anti-spam customers that described the situation as follows (this was when Postini had esimtated that spam was at 94% – I’m too lazy to recalculate for 92% – I think you get the picture though):

“If we can block 99% of the junk destined for your mailboxes, approximately 16 junk mail messages would make it through to a user’s mailbox for every 100 real messages that are delivered. At 98% that would be 31 messages per 100 messages. At 97% that is 47 messages per 100 real messages! So at a 98% effective rate for blocking spam, to the end user it appears as if they are receiving one spam message for every two real messages they receive. In reality, they are having over 1500 messages blocked for every 100 they receive.”

As I discussed just a couple of days ago here, it’s pretty cheap for marketers to hire someone to spew their message forth.  I can’t see how we can get ahead of this game as long as it is so lucrative.  Maybe one of our readers has the answer to this never-ending dilemma!

Happy emailing!

Danita