Are Botnets Beating Us in the War on Spam?
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They’re calling it Spam 2.0: a huge wave of unsolicited bulk email whose senders use sophisticated techniques to get around spam filters. Some spam fighters look at the botnet-generated flood and say we’re losing the war on spam. Why are we getting so much more spam now, and is there a way to stem the tide?

The numbers are almost indisputable. According to Postini, an online message management company, spam volume has risen 73 percent in the last three months. For the year, the quantity of spam is up 143 percent. Other studies have noted that spam accounts for as many as nine out of every ten emails sent.

The story gets worse though. Spammers are embedding their text-based messages in images, which spam filters can’t read well enough to block. This is called “image spam,” and you can read more about its increase in recent months in another article on this site. Images take up several times as much space as text, so the rise in image spam means that more bandwidth is being consumed by spam, overloading networks and aggravating users.

Read the rest of this article at DevShed.com.