Internet Defense Technology

Some information and statistics about spam:

A new study indicates that 92% of all email sent in the first quarter of 2008 was spam.

4.6% of all spam originates from web based email services such as Gmail and Yahoo. With Yahoo the most abused web mail service and is responsible for 86.7% of web mail based spam sent (according to MessageLabs).

Spam from Gmail increased from 1.3 percent in January to 2.6 percent in February, with most advertising skin flick websites.

The rest of the spam is a from made-up or hacked domains.

Subject matters include:
* Online Pharmacies (vast majority at about 50%)
* Replica Products
* Casino and Gaming
* Software Sales
* Illegal Advertising
* Credit and Debt Relief
* Bank Phishing
* Job Offers
* Free Offers
(according to Barracuda Central)

The US has maintained is first place in relaying the world’s spam email, in Q1 2008.

Other countries like China, Turkey and Russia fight for the next three spots.

So, there is a general look at spam for this last week, exciting in nerdy sort of way and scary in other ways. Don’t see much change other than it getting worse while companies like ours continue to work to prevent the spam from ever reaching your box.

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

I have an old practice of using a hotmail address for all my on-line registration activities, keeps my main email address clean of spam (even before we started Internet Defense Technology it worked pretty well, but did start getting spam though I thought I had never used it, problem handled since we got started).

New thing being talked about now is “Disposable Email Addresses” or DEA.

Some are paid, some are free.

Some are set up where you just get one free email address, use it for your registration, get the registration information and then “dispose” of the email address.

Some have you tell them what your real address is, then sign up for several fake addresses which will be forwarded to your real address. You use each fake address once for a sign-up and can watch to see which one eventually gets spammed (and then you know who sold your address) and can dispose of that address.

While this has been around for a little bit, I just recently heard of it. Looks pretty good, only issues I can think of is if you need to be able get back in to a registration or profile information and have to have that email address and you already disposed of it, would have a problem.

However, I really like the idea.

Update: Just saw a good list of these which I thought I would just link to rather than trying to re-do: http://www.techsnack.net

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam