An article in the Guardian (Jan 12th) claimed that spam is dead. To test this theory, we compiled a week’s spam from last year and compared them with a week of this year’s spam from a well known email address that has been receiving spam for many years.
We classified the spam into five categories: Product (Viagra, Rolex, Softtabs etc), Scams (Lotteries, 419s, Job Offers), Stocks, Phishing and Virus.
Our results, illustrated below, show that spam is not dead but still, for a given address, at approximately at the same level in both 2005 and 2006. One interesting change that we did observe that the subject line of spams in 2006 was not as obscured (digits for letters etc.) as for spam in 2005, possibly an recognition that this type of filter bypass mechanism is no longer effective - an acknowledgment that spam is either filtered or not filtered.
However, by way of complete contrast, for a recently created address, about one month old, we found that the majority of emails were scams and phishing, with not many other emails from the categories above.
The conclusion is: People are filtering spams better than before; but the nature of unsolicited email is changing . With more and more phishing and scams emails of better quality than before. A decent spam filter that can trap these new threats is essential.