That 5 percent better be worth it. Tell me how much a baseball player would be worth with a batting average of .050?

If I got my stories right just 5 percent of the time…well, so that might elicit a sigh of surprised relief from my editor; bad example. But e-mail, I expected more out of you.

Barracuda Networks has released its annual spam report, finding that nearly 95 percent of all e-mail is spam. In 2001, Barracuda estimate that just 5 percent of all e-mail was spam.

The report identifies spam as the single greatest advertising irritant among office workers. Worse than postal mail, worse than telemarketers.

In 2004, when the CAN-SPAM Act took effect, spam was just 70 percent of all e-mail.

The report found that more spam messages are coming with attachments of PDFs and other file formats.

Next up: New Year's Resolution spam messages. With spammers increasingly disguising themselves as legitimate retailers, the messages often appear with professional-looking text and images enticing the recipient to click on a link promising what the subject heading suggests. "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" saw a spike in these campaigns, and you can expect the same after New Year's, Barracuda suggests.


InternetNews.com