You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. And that goes for good spam protection.

It’s been an interesting day at the office – I got a lot done, but I dare say I might have done even better without the deluge of spam that came my way. I even called it a “SpamStorm” to a co-worker.

Cialis SpamGiven that spam is more annoyance than anything else, who in their right mind would spend the time on such a low-payoff activity? Someone who understands the rules of internet business: volume, volume, volume.

The odds of actually generating revenue from a spam e-mail are quite low. Probably something on the order of 1-in-5,000,000. So, the proper thing to do is send out 20,000,000 messages. Sometimes the spammer gets paid based on an actual sale, sometimes just for getting enough people to “click through” to the checkout page.

The scary part is not just the increase in numbers of e-mails sent (one estimate calculated that 94% of e-mails sent in December of 2006 were spam.) Now the content is getting beefier (if spam had beef, that is.) The average size of a text-only spam e-mail is around 5500 bytes. That includes all of the biblical passages and random literary quotes they toss in to throw off the content-based spam filters. However, an increasing amount of spam is image-based: instead of putting the sales pitch in words, they are embedded in a picture file that averages more than 18,000 bytes. Not only is there more spam, it is even more unhealthy to “teh internet pipes.”

What provoked today’s spamstorm? A couple of co-workers thought our firewall might be down. More likely, it’s just the natural progression. Spam comes in waves.

So, what can you do about it? Here are my recommendations.

Turn off the preview pane in your e-mail program. Outlook, Thunderbird, whatever. The moment your computer tries to render the image in the spam e-mail, it sends back a request to the host server. In other words, by viewing the spam-pic, you have verified for the spammer that your e-mail address is valid. Just turn off the preview pane, or look for an option that blocks the images from unknown senders.

If you do happen to open an e-mail from a spammer – for everyone’s sake, don’t click anything. The act of clicking might just put a few pennies in a spammer’s pocket – and given the high volume of traffic they are dealing in, a few pennies here and a few pennies there add up to a ticket out of Mom’s basement.

Feel free to add your spam-stories or spam-suggestions below.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, spam, internet[/tags]