Only YOU Can Make a Big Difference
Don't want your machine taken over by spam bots to become a zombie, spewing spam from your brandy new DSL line? Buy a Mac :-). Or at least figure out how to button up your current OS to make sure that the bad guys can't use it to mess with the rest of us.
Meantime, I must thank the amazing Gaige for cutting down my personal spam load to perhaps 10% of what I WAS getting. The vast majority of what's left is filtered beautifully by Spam Sieve. Thanks guys!
BBC NEWS | Technology | More than 95% of e-mail is 'junk':
More than 95% of e-mail is junk, be it spam, error messages or viruses, report mail monitoring firms.
Analysis of the contents of millions of e-mails has revealed that less than 4% is legitimate traffic.
Further work has shown that most of this junk mail is originating on hijacked home computers.
E-mail security firm Return Path said 99% of the computers it monitors that send mail have been taken over by spammers or virus writers.
Return Path reached its estimate by calculating a "reputation score" for the 20 million net addresses of those machines.
The score was derived by analyzing the e-mail traffic sent through those addresses, the number of complaints filed about that address, and if the owner of that address responds to complaints.
The vast majority of these net addresses were not good net citizens, said George Bilbrey, spokesman for Return Path.
Only 1% of net addresses could be regarded as legitimate sources of mail.