No Wonder!

Well, we all knew it -- 96% of the email sent last year was spam. If you're like me, you get one or two actual emails accompanied by pages and pages of ads, offers, and other crap that seems to overwhelm everything. Even with good spam filters, dozens of these make it through every day.

Can you imagine how much better things would perform if there wasn't 96 spam messages for every four valid emails? When they need just one person to respond to the spam to "pay" for the millions of messages they send, well, it ain't gonna go away anytime soon.

So, the Economist has quantified it:

LAST year, spam accounted for up to 96% of all e-mail traffic, according to Commtouch, a security-software company. Undeterred by tough legislation and better security, spammers use increasingly sophisticated methods to evade filters and fool increasingly savvy internet users. But the nature of spam remains pretty basic. In the last three months of 2007, 70% of e-mails offered sexual enhancers,

Well, that certainly describes my inbox. Viagra, Cialias, less-than-savory offers for things that will enlarge or enhance a part of the anatomy that I don't have...

Only about 1% are pornography, and about 5% are fake financial scams. I don't know if this includes the "phishing" emails -- I have to assume it does, since those are the most common financial emails out there. I knew it was bad, but I didn't realize that almost 70% of ALL EMAIL traversing the internet was for 'sexual enhancers'. Well, we know what's important, now, don't we?