John Pescatore

Symantec’s MessageLabs unit recently reported that 90% of email is spam.  Spamhaus defines spam as:

An electronic message is “spam” IF: (1) the recipient’s personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients;  AND (2) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent.

Even before Internet email, 90% of corporate email was spam by this definition of spam- the dreaded “reply-all” function guaranteed that. Even before any form of email, snail mail has long been close to 90% spam (known back in the day as “junk mail”), as well. The real issue is that the US Postal Service makes a good chunk of its money delivering physical spam since it owns the entire delivery channel from source to destination. ISPs only make a little bit of money delivering electronic junk mail, since only the “pickup” ISP actually directly gets compensated.

Nine out of ten faxes were spam – mostly companies trying to sell us fax paper to replace what the spam used up. Heck, as long as I can remember 90% of the conversation at meetings was “irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients” and I had no way of making it stop – 90% of meetings are spam! Billboards are spam! Skywriting! Christmas carolers going through the neighborhood! 

But the press loves numbers – if you can attach a statistic to anything about security attacks, you will get coverage. McAfee last month published a report that said spam had the same annual carbon footprint as 3.1 million automobiles. Damn – I was just about to suggest that Christmas carolers email out .mpg files instead of spamming my front door.