Spam is Back and Worse Than Ever!

Spam, not the lunchmeat, is clogging our e-mail boxes worse than ever. The past year had a respite, but now the spammers are back with a vengence. Almost every email server has a spam filter to keep spam from reaching the enduser, but in the past few months the spammers have learned to get around these filters and are bombarding email boxes everywhere.

I know that I have every trick possible working to stop the spam and still my mailbox is 90 percent full of the garbage. What is even scarier is that is the norm these days.

Worldwide, spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam-filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than nine out of every 10 e-mails sent over the Internet.
Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 percent to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day, Ironport says.
The anti-spam industry is struggling to keep up with the surge. It is adding computer power and developing new techniques in an effort to avoid losing the battle with the most sophisticated spammers.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Three years ago, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates made an audacious prediction: The problem of junk e-mail, he said, “will be solved by 2006.” And for a time, there were signs that he was going to be proven right. via the Seattle Post