While wading through my daily dose of spam (which originally never plagued my Gmail account, but now has risen to approximately 50 spam a day), I started thinking about the quality of information. How do we gauge the value of something that there is so much of out there?
How can we filter out the good from the bad — and prevent users from missing that one important message that went into the junk mail folder? First though, I decided to look at some statistics about spam.
The famous Akismet spam filter (which filters Wordpress spam) has caught a total of 2,171,905,896 spam comments so far. According to Akismet, this accounts for 94% of all comments left on blogs. Taking a look at the the diagram below (which is borrowed from the good folks at Akismet), we can see that legitimate messages make up a tiny portion of all comments.
Similarly, Postini (a corporate spam filtering company) has their own set of stats on email spam. They estimate that of 628, 376, 826 emails sent, 77.4% of those are spam. However, junk-o-meter.com puts the percentage of spam even higher, at close to 90%.
None of this even accounts for all of the other junk information out there such as spam messages on social networking sites or spam mobile phone messages. The ever-increasing bandwidth made possible by communication technologies has rapidly oupaced our own limited human bandwidth (which will be a little more difficult to upgrade than the technology we build).
And with all that junk information out there, it’s going to get more and more difficult for us to wade through it all. If the amount of spam we get keeps increasing at the same rate, we’ll be constantly bombarded with more and more junk information all the time. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time keeping up with just the legimiate communications I get.
I have a multitude of email accounts, social networking accounts, messenging clients, mobile text messages and voice messages — that are currently all relatively spam free. Will we be able to keep fighting spam the way we do now as the problem inevitably worsens? Is information pollution going to become a serious threat to our personal and work lives within the next 10 years?
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July 30th, 2007 at 1:26 am
Certainly without tools like Akismet, ’twas ever thus. But then, open a magazine like Harper’s Bazaar or Heat and look at the proportion of advertising vs content. Then consider how much of the content is actually worth reading! I fill a recycling sack weekly with the amount of junk that comes through my letter box.
What I’m saying is that in many ways, ’twas ever thus but we’ve always kept just ahead of the game. And I’m optimistic that we’ll continue to do so. I don’t even bother checking my akismet or spam folders anymore - if it’s really important, the person involved will find a way to reach me.
July 30th, 2007 at 7:24 am
Great points, Michael. I was thinking about this as I wrote this post actually. The funny thing I find about the ads that come in the mail are that I recycle them without even looking at them. I’d say they’re the physical equivalent of spam — not at all targeted and just annoying.
There is a local computer parts store that will mail out a catalogue of their parts and sales to you however — and I’ll very often skim through the whole thing in the elevator. They also send out a regular email, which I’ll probably spend a bit more time looking through.
Even the most desperate call for attention in unsolicited communication now tends to get ignored. I scan my spam once in a while to make sure a message didn’t slip through, and noticed a message from ‘The Ministry of Financial Affairs’ titled ‘Are You Dead Or Alive? Call This Number Now!’. With a bit of a chuckle, I deleted it instantly. It’s interesting how our mental spam becomes so finely attuned.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
[...] So my conclusion would be this: challenge questions aren’t really an effective way to fight spam (at least not in my case). Has anyone else had a different experience with the spam they get or the tools they use to fight them? With all that spam out there, it makes you wonder how much more we can really handle. [...]