I read a lot in various newsletters I get about the extent of the spam/virus problem, but nothing drives it home like a snapshot of your own email volume.
My spam provider just launched a new service, a monthly report in PDF format of the actions it has taken over the last 30 days with your email. (SpamSoap isn't software installed on your own PC to filter out spam. Since I have my own mail server, I route all mail first through SpamSoap, which then forwards on all legit email to my server.)
For the month of October, SpamSoap sent 1% of the email addressed to the holtz.com domain on to me. The rest was either quarantined (13%) or denied altogether (86%). In other words, 99% of the email sent to holtz.com was illegitimate.
If the percentages are eye-opening, consider the numbers. For the month, 832,776 emails were received, but only 10,024 were sent on. The emails broke down like this:
- Spam detected: 361,456
- Virus detected: 1,151
- Attachment violations: 7
- Content violations: 60,033
For the year to date, the numbers are even more staggering: 26,326,829 spam messages and 54,241 viruses. At this pace, SpamSoap will have blocked more than 30 million spam messages destined for holtz.com by the time New Year's rolls around.
Astounding.
a shel of my former self, a blog from organizational communications consultant Shel Holtz, addresses the intersection of technology, business, and communication.