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The Unbearable Burden of Spam
Posted by Mike Klassen on December 3, 2006 in Zeitgeist
The very interesting and committed blogger Paul Kedrovsky has been writing a lot lately on the subject of stock spam.
I've written recently on the staggering increase in online spam, driven, in part, by Russian bot-nets doing micro-cap stock flogging, but seeing the numbers directly is stark stuff. According to Postini, unwanted email is now 91% of all email traffic, and over the past twelve months the daily volume of spam has risen more than 120% -- and it was up 59% between September and the current month.
This week I spent nearly 3 - 4 hours dealing directly with spam as it was coming into my web host, all of it relating to penny stock scams. Everyday a new routine appears, forcing me to set up another filter that will hopefully begin to block it.
Automated comment spam has forced many web hosts to shut down blogs that are not properly updated and patched with spam prevention plug-ins.
According to the stats Kedrovsky shares, spam has increased 60% ever since kids went back to school at Labour Day. That's amazing, and my spam filters are indicative of it.
Paul suggests that most email spam comes from Russian bots. While I cannot dispute this, I noticed that spam dropped off sharply during the US Thanksgiving Day holiday. I don't think Russians are particularly in tune with Americans' days off, are they? That's why I still suspect that most of these scams are still US-based.
The drug-promoting comment spam links, which thousands of blogs suffer from, are purely about increasing Google Page Rank, and it makes sense that these might come from overseas.
Spam is a poison that can strangle the internet if not checked. At the rate it is growing, can we go another one or two years without a major international initiative to crush it?
Tagged: favourite, internet culture, spam
Comments
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I know that I'm getting way more spam than I used to. I don't know if it's much worse than a few weeks ago, but it's definitely worse than a few months ago.
I agree that it's a problem, but I wonder whether we'll all just have to get used to it, just like those flyers and brochures that magically appear in my mailbox.
It seems to come and go. Since adding some strict manual filtering, I'm not getting so many of the stock scam emails, and most are caught by my host's spam filter.
I'm sure it won't last though.