> On 9 Dec 2024, at 16:59, John Levine via mailop <mailop@mailop.org> wrote: > > It has been my impression that for many years about 90% of the mail a > system typically recieves is spam. Most of it is easy to filter so > the amount that gets into a user's mailbox is a lot less. I sure see > a lot of attempted deliveries on my small MTAs. > > I ask because I've ben looking at a paper that asserts that the number > is about 50% and has been for a long time, which just seems wrong. > > What sort of numbers to people here see? Are there any credible > published estimates? Way too many of the numbers I see are basically > someone says I set up a mailbox and counted mail messages for a week > and then multiplied by ten billion.
I was looking for estimates for a white paper I wrote for a customer a few years ago. I found a lot of stats and published data from the early / mid 2000s that said 80 / 90%. The reporting on the extent of the problem seemed to drop off then and I found a lot less related to the percentage of mail that was spam. What I did find matches closer to what your paper says - it dropped to a lesser percentage. I eventually decided I couldn’t make sense of the research over time (comparing apples and traffic cones type of thing) so I handwaved through the mail. I do think the % of spam has dropped as the proportion of ‘legit’ mail has increased. Back when spam was 90% of mail, we didn’t have multiple social networks sending billions of emails a day about activity on the sites. We didn’t have multiple ESPs that were consistently sending a billion emails a day each. I think the raw numbers of spam have gone up (or possibly plateaued) but the number of real bulk mails has gone up proportionally more and so the overall % of spam has gone down. If anyone has better data, I’m all for it. But I did dig into this a while back and that was the conclusion I’d come to. laura -- The Delivery Expert Laura Atkins Word to the Wise la...@wordtothewise.com Delivery hints and commentary: http://wordtothewise.com/blog
_______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
