To provide some indication of the prevalence of spam, the internet security company Sybari tracks and tallies emailed spam, and publishes the results of its findings. Sybari recently released its summary for the month of March, 2004, and found that total volume of spam mail during March was 30% greater than February. The number of different spam messages mailed out on a daily basis is also enormous with Sybari recording 660,000 separate spams on March 1, and 883,000 on March 31, with a record peak recorded on March 25 when over a million new spam messages were recorded. It should be noted that these numbers are for different email message, with each unique message only being counted once, even if millions of that particular message were sent.

Supporting these statistics is a recent report from the Californias Radicati Group which calculated that a total of 15 billion spam emails were sent in 2003, and that a predicted 35 billion will be sent this year, more than double the number despite the U.S. anti-spam law, and similar laws in Europe, Australia, and other places. Radicati estimates that over one-half of all email is spam, which is below the estimates of some other organizations, which claim that spam and virus bearing emails combined now account for about 79% of all email. A recent Pew Foundation survey indicates that one-half of all internet users are now less trusting of email because of the spam epidemic.

Since email filtering to reduce the amount of spam reaching our inboxes has now become almost universally provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), third party software and services, and our email programs themselves, the amount of spam actually received by individuals varies substantially. Another survey by Radicati showed that only 17% of email actually received by business users is spam, while the average consumer still finds about 30% of their received email is spam, the remainder of spam being stopped by some form of spam filter.

Despite active filtering by many ISPs, subscribers are still expressing dissatisfaction with the amount of spam actually received. AOL is claiming a success of sorts, because the daily complaints from its subscribers have declined by half during the month of March, averaging only 6.8 million complaints per day. Other major ISPs have been reporting about the opposite, as spam complaints are steadily increasing. This dissatisfaction has resulted in the blossoming of an anti-spam industry, with service fees and software sales of anti-spam products reaching an estimated $1 billion in sales in 2004. Despite the proliferation of these services and software products, spammers are rapidly developing new ways to penetrate our anti-spam defenses, requiring anti-spam companies to continuously update their products just as antivirus publishers must update theirs in order to be effective and provide protection.

Still another problem is the improper filtering of legitimate messages which may not be received by their intended recipients. According to Return Path, a monitoring company, nearly 19% of all emails sent by its commercial clients, which include legitimate newsletters and opt-in subscription services, are never received by the recipients due to improper filtering. One popular anti-spam method is referred to as Bayesian Filter which is designed to learn which email is spam and which is legitimate. While somewhat effective, it is also notorious for blocking legitimate messages, and allowing some spam to slip through undetected. Often used in academic and corporate environments, filters such as these are typically monitored by technicians to review all blocked emails, and forward those erroneously blocked. In many organizations, this manual review of blocked email has become a major expense in time and money, as well as a security and privacy issue.

Spam is not just an email problem, as our text capable cell phones and instant messaging services are now being targeted by spammers. According to a recent article in InformationWeek, SPIM or spam sent through instant messaging is also rampant. Estimates by Radicati for the number of SPIMs this year may reach 1.2 billion. This is compared to 500 million in 2003, according to Ferris Research. Another research organization, the Yankee Group, estimates that between 5% and 8% of all instant messages, including internal corporate instant messages, are SPIM.

While there are many tools available to filter spam and spim, the best course of action is to simply not buy from any spammer. Also, even though the Can-Spam act requires spammers to include a functional remove me link in their spam, there is still significant evidence that most spammers are not honoring delete requests, but reselling the remove me emails to other spammers!

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