Imaginary Landscape
RSS FeedI stumbled upon a depressing study. It is the Barracuda Networks annual spam report. In it, they report that 90%-95% of all email is spam. This is up from 70% in 2004, the year the CAN-SPAM Act was enacted, and up from 5% in 2001. Barracuda uses its own list of 50,000 clients and the more than 1 billion emails sent to them as the basis of the study.
The study also concluded that spam is now the worst form of junk advertising, surpassing telemarketing calls.
One look at my inbox and it is clear that spam has taken over the earth. Between 6pm last night and 10am this morning, I received 434 email messages - three of which were non-spam.
For years, the staff page on our Web site allowed site visitors to email staff directly. Each employee's name was hyperlinked to their email address. It was part of who we are - all staff directly accessible to the world.
Last month I had to remove that feature because the amount of spam we receive has finally become overwhelming. Removing the email links is the only thing that will stop the automated email address harvesting programs from gathering and spamming to all staff members.
I guess I can obfuscate our addresses with the clunky, "brian [at] imagescape [dot] com." Now instead of one click, it's a copy/paste/edit.
It's sad, really.
Updated 07/14/10 @ 11:50AM CDT by brian
Categories: Technology Web News
