For our first post to the MX News Blog, we thought it would be appropriate to talk dive into the hot story of the late fall/early winter- Spam rates have soared (sored) into the stratosphere. According to Postini, Spam volumes increased by 60% in September and October. Barracuda networks reported an increase of 67% during roughly the same time frame. What does this mean in terms of raw numbers? Well, Postini reports that it monitored 70 Billion Emails during September and October and 91% were Spam. That means that there were 60.4 Billion or SPAM messages filtered in September and October by Postini ALONE!

Estimates have placed the total number of Spam messages sent to be 55 Billion Per day…and that was in June, 2006, BEFORE the massive uptick we have seen this Fall/Winter. Not only are the Spammers busy flooding the entire system with gargantuan amounts of bandwidth chewing, productivity killing Spam, they are dictating the rules of the filtering game as well. For example, there has been a huge increase in Image Spam over the past several months. Why? Because many Spam filtering solutions are entirely text based. So, Spammers build messages with layers of images to slip past inadequate filters, hog more bandwidth than before and land in millions of inboxes daily. Here is an example:

Image Spam is just the latest “innovation” by the Web Thugs to bypass filters and continue with Web Thuggery as usual.