Spammers are the most resilient group of people that we at MxToolBox have ever seen! Spam volumes temporarily dropped in November 2008 when the McColo web hosting service was taken offline but since that drop in spam volumes, spam has been increasing an average of 1.2% per day in the first quarter. By comparison, the growth rate of spam volume in Q1 2008 was approximately 1% per day – which, at the time, was a record high.

Data from across the web suggests that spammers are working hard at adopting new strategies to avoid another interruption of their work. Google says “The recent upward trajectory could indicate that spammers are building botnets that are more robust but send less volume – or that they haven’t enabled their botnets to run at full capacity because they’re wary of exposing a new ISP as a target.”

An alarming trend is that we have seen the return of image spam which was very prevalent in 2007. Typically spammers do not repeat spam campaigns, but perhaps they believe we have become forgetful? Our filters were oriented to block image spam back in 2007 and so we are confident that they will stand up to this latest trend.

We’ve worked hard to make sure our Managed Email Services are providing the highest possible level of protection for our customers mailbox’s though any new spam tactics.

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