An analysis of data from an e-mail filtering firm shows that more inboxes are being targeted with more junk than ever before.
According to research released Friday by San Francisco-based Brightmail Inc., the amount of junk e-mail sent to U.S. Internet service providers has approximately quintupled in the last year.
The firm found e-mail users getting deluged with an unprecedented quantity of unsolicited messages about finances, pornography, and, more than anything else, product pitches.
"It's really about getting people to buy things," said Matt Steele, Brightmail's chief operating officer. Messages selling products accounted for 41 percent of e-mail attacks in the last week of September. Other top categories included financial advice, health and adult-oriented spam.
Brightmail didn't have a figure for what percentage of spam actually makes it through filters and reaches people's inboxes.
But even with filtering applications for weeding out junk, executives said that in many cases the majority of unwanted e-mails still get through. And a standard attack includes anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of unsolicited messages.
Part of the problem is that more people are viewing spam as a good form of cheap advertising.
"More and more people are going to discover that the costs of sending out e-mail are trivial compared with other means," said David Ferris, research director at Ferris Research, an analyst firm that specializes in messaging technologies.
While it would costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to send old-fashioned junk mail to millions of people, an email campaign of the same size would be virtually free.
And spammers are getting better at evading filters.
"We've definitely seen an increase in the sophistication of masking techniques they use," Steele said.
It's often difficult to track where a message originates. Spammers have also gotten better at automatically creating "personalized" messages -- say, with a recipient's name in the subject line -- that are more difficult to recognize as junk.
Spammers have also benefited from greater availability of home broadband connections. It's a lot easier to pump out tens of thousands of unwanted messages with a DSL line than with a dial-up connection, noted Ken Schneider, Brightmail's chief technology officer.
The solution? Well, no one's found a way yet to keep all the "get-rich-quick-while-working-at-home", "check-out-foxy-babes" and "win-a-Porsche-with-the-click-of-a-mouse" marketing come-ons from making it to the inbox.
For most spam-burdened e-mail users, the standard response is to simply hitting the delete key. For maximum effectiveness, however, Ferris suggests they might also employ the time-consuming yet personally gratifying technique known as the nasty complaint.
"People, when they get spam, should react very aggressively," he said. "Send them e-mail back that lets them know they're creating ill feeling."
