According to a fresh study done by the Swedish Internet provider Spray, the amount of junk mail being sent to its subscribers has increased from 80% to 90% during 2006. I’m sure that this reflects the situation in most of Europe and the U.S. as well (AOL reported around 80% junk mail in the U.S. by the end of 2005). 

Fortunately, more than 50% of these junk mails come from known spam servers and are being filtered out by Spray and the other ISPs that are part of the Lycos Europe network. About 5% are stopped by a personal filter that the user have set up and most of the remaining 30% contain words such as Viagra and automatically redirected to the users junk mail folder.

This leaves us with less actual spam in our inbox than a few years ago when less than 50% of all emails sent were junk mail.

My Take: While I’m sure that a lot of the spam that I get is filtered out, dealing with junk mail is still an annoying part my life. As soon as I sign up for a service or become a member of a website I need to access either professionally and personally, I know that I might see an increasing number of junk mails in my inbox the next day.

So, I think twice about signing up for lesser known sites or use the controversial website www.bugmenot.com, where you can get user generated usernames and passwords to many URLs. Sometimes I also mask my email like this jay(at)digitalmediawire(dot)com when I sign up, which helps against spammers that crawl the Internet for email addresses, but it is not a fool-proof method.

However, my main problem with spam is not just that it is a waste of my time deleting crap every day. It is that emails that I have sent to people with bad filters get deleted by mistake. One common mistake that people make is to set up an out-of-office reply when they are away on vacation, which just tells the spammers that it is an active email account and then you have an email-bomb waiting for you in your inbox when you get back.

There is great technology out there and Microsoft Sender ID has been helpful for a lot of people, but I don’t think that there is a way to totally filter out spam, any more than there is a way to totally stop illegal downloading of music. It is just one of those things that I guess we will have to live with.

PS. If any of you readers have figured out great ways to avoid spam, let me know. I’ll share it with the rest of the DMW readers.