Spam Levels Lowest in Three Years

What the world could definitely use less of is spam and according to recent reports, it’s declining. Global spam is at the lowest it’s ever been since 2008. This could be a sign that spammers are beginning to look elsewhere like Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

Here are the numbers: 70.5 percent of all email this year was spam, compared to 90+ percent from just a few years ago.

From October to November, Symantec reports a 3.7 percent drop alone. (Read more about this here.)

Who is responsible for spam? Where is it coming from, anyways? According to this Network World article, the largest botnet is “Grum,” responsible for about 25 percent of global spam and currently infecting 470,000 computers. The country sending the most spam is the US, responsible for 28 percent of all spam messages, followed by India, Russia, Brazil and China.

Here are some tips to help you receive less spam:

1. Have a throw-away “junk” email account. Create a free email address from Hotmail or Yahoo! and use it to subscribe to free trials, commenting on websites and have another private email for other things.
2. Protect your PC. It’s always important to make sure that you have a good, secure firewall.
3. “Hide” your address. Don’t put your email address on your website in plain text. Spammers can pick this up and then start sending you spam.
4. Create a unique email address. Adding numbers or symbols (if possible) to an email address makes it more difficult for spammers to try to guess your address.
5. Ignore and delete suspicious emails. If you’re not 100 percent sure that you know who sent it to you, DELETE it!