

Spam overwhelms e-mail messages (now 97%) - CalmQuiet
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7988579.stm

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Brushfire
And on the flip side, I get very little spam to any of my inboxes.

This includes gmail, an exchange server using Frontbridge, and some personal
domains running on dreamhost.

I'd be more interested to hear about what portion of this spam gets through
modern filters.

~~~
jgrahamc
Virus Bulletin has started testing the efficacity of spam filters and will be
publishing the results. In the initial tests the best product caught 96.24%
with a false positive rate of 0.06% (although there are some caveats---see the
article below).

Using the ratios 97% is spam/3% is ham the ratio of spam to ham in your inbox
using the best solution would be about 1.2. So you should see more spam in
your inbox than ham, but not by much.

So it's probably manageable to manually delete the spam in the inbox (if
annoying).

But the flip side is interesting. What's the ratio between false positives in
the spam folder and captured spam messages? Using those figures above it's 1
in 50,000. i.e. almost impossible to manually look for false positives.

<http://www.virusbtn.com/vbspam/trialresults.xml>

~~~
Zak
I see significantly better results than that using gmail combined with the
filter built in to Evolution. Spam almost never gets through. I would estimate
that no more than 1 in 200 actual spams get through.

A somewhat higher number of newsletter-type messages from businesses I've
bought from in the past show up. Many times, these messages are sent to
everyone who orders, with no ability to not opt in when placing an order. I
would assume these messages are not counted in that 97% figure.

------
teyc
Isn't it so that the harder the spammers try, the easier it is to pick out
their signatures?

------
TweedHeads
Like telemarketing killed landlines, spam killed email.

I rarely use it.

~~~
almost
Telemarketing killed landlines? That doesn't seem quite correct...

And spam doesn't really seem to have killed email either, _you_ may rarely use
it but the rest of the (connected) world does still seem to.

