Spam

Spam is a serious email problem that is only getting worse. Leading industry analysts collectively agree that spam proliferation is still on the increase.

M86 Security's own research into spam has indicated that it costs up to 4 cents (US) per message on average. Considering the hundreds of millions of spam messages that are sent every day, the costs are staggering. Fortunately, MailMarshal SMTP consistently achieves a spam catch rate of over 99 percent.

Spam senders have a simple business model: they use other people's resources as much as possible. With very low operating costs, it only takes a few responses for a campaign to turn a profit. As spam detection percentages improve, spammers are constantly employing new technologies to get the message through, including:

• "Botnets" of remote PCs infected by viruses and turned into spam senders, delivering increased volume
• Messages using images to deliver a text, bypassing lexical analysis
• Messages using multiple images
• Subtle differences in messages, to avoid signature based detection