John Ryan’s Blog

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A recent report by an US internet security company (Postini), says that 9 out of 10 e-mails are spam. This shocking report goes on to state that “E-mail systems are overloaded or melting down trying to keep up with all the spam,” A vice president for Postini said, its company has detected 7 billion spam e-mails worldwide in November compared to 2.5 billion in June.

I must say that in my experience this report is 100% accurate, if not 110% accurate. Recently I have noticed that my spam filter sorts through, on average, 10,000 pieces of spam over a period of only 5 days or less, not including the pieces of spam that make it through the spam filter. I decided to do a little experiment and open a few of these e-mails and see what they were selling, and here comes the shocking bit.

Nothing! Yes nothing, the e-mails (well most of them) contained random words that did not make a coherent sentence, and whilst there were links in some of the mails, they did not refer to an active site, or in come cases, the link did not contain a correctly written domain name.

I can only conclude that these e-mails must be an attempt to damage, or slow down mail severs – as suggested by the opening quote above, by sending large quantities of spam, the servers are unable to handle all this data.