The Good News On Spam Is Not Actually Good, And Not Really About Spam

from the smoke,-mirrors-and-statistics dept

It seems like every anti-spam companies likes to release statistics every few months or so about the "overall state of the spam market" and these stats never seem to agree with one another -- except in the general sense that the spam problem is still a big one. With that in mind, I pretty much ignored the story today from one of the anti-spam vendors saying that the spam rate was declining. However, spam-watcher Brian McWilliams actually did take the time to look through it and realized that when they say "the spam rate declined while the volume went up" all they really mean is that the rate of growth of legit email outpaced the rate of growth of spam email -- but both are growing. As he points out, that's hardly worth considering as "progress." It's not about spam filters getting any better, just about more legitimate emails being sent.

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