Currently about 80 percent of email received by users is spam, but this is expected to rise to about 95 percent by the end of this year.
ISPs and savvy end-users do try to block as much of the spam as possible, but spammers are increasingly coming up with new ways to fool spam filters. "Image spam", the latest weapon in the spammers' arsenal, embeds the message as a picture in the email, followed by lines of random text. About one in three spam emails is now image spam, double that of six months ago. A European report estimates the cost of spam globally at more than $17 billion a year.
Apart from the obvious nuisance value of spam, it also has a more dangerous side, including attached viruses and phishing scams.
A new trend has seen some people fight back against the scammers and spammers. Tired of the barrage of internet scams, a group of tech-savvy Australian vigilantes have taken the law into their own hands. The self-labelled "scambaiters", fool the scammers at their own game by pretending to be hapless victims, with the goal of wasting as much of the scammer's time and money as possible.
While this may sound like a good idea it is certainly not something regular internet users should attempt. Some of the email scammers belong to organised crime syndicates and can be dangerous if provoked.
The best line of defence is just to ignore the advances made by the scammers.
ISPs and computer websites offer ideas and tips on how to reduce the amount of spam. Unfortunately, many of these suggestions require a basic understanding of software and hardware, something which is seriously lacking in the average computer user.
A large amount of spam is removed by ISPs before it hits users' inboxes, but too much still makes it through, creating chaos for internet users.
Last month many users complained of delays in emails sent from Xtra while the spam deluge knocked thousands of ihug customers off their email accounts for several days in November. Customers of other providers have also faced outages and delays of up to a week.
ISPs have had their work cut out for them dealing with spam. Users need to back that up with by becoming more savvy and realising that offers too good to be true, probably are. |
