Archive for November, 2006

Yes, spam is getting worse. A flood of new “bots” and and other nefarious programs have started a new offensive (and it is very offensive) against our inboxes. Unfortunately, there’s not much that we can do about it right now. By using “zombies” (innocent computers taken over by viruses) and creating e-mails that are very difficult for automatic filters to differentiate from real e-mail, the spam creators are able to ignore most of the defenses we have. A leading corporate e-mail provider claims that 91% of the traffic that passes through their servers is spam.

Here at Geek Niche, our filtering ability is at its limit. Pushing our defenses higher risks deleting real e-mails. If this new wave of spam turns out to be more than a short-term spike, we’ll look at alternate, more aggressive, means of filtering–even though we run the risk of catching real e-mails in the filters.