If you thought spam, viruses, and fraudulent e-mail made 2003 tough, just wait until next year. That’s the bottom-line message from Postini, a major player in the mail-filtering market that issued its Top 10 list of predictions for 2004 Wednesday. Postini, which filters e-mail for spam, viruses, and other threats for Internet service providers and enterprises — its flagship service, Perimeter Manager, is deployed by over 2,000 organizations — didn’t pull its prognostications out of thin air. It based them on data acquired from processing over a billion messages per week during 2003, said Andrew Lochart, the company’s director of product marketing. The company’s top prediction for 2004? Spam will continue to climb as a percentage of total e-mail from its current average rate of 50 percent to an even more alarming 75 percent in 2004. “If you’re not protected [against spam], things are going to get much worse,” he said. “The volume of spam in both absolute terms and in percentage is increasing, and we don’t see any trends on the horizon to mitigate that.” Postini’s own numbers were even higher; out of the 160 million messages the company filtered a day during 2003, 81.3 percent were spam. During the year, the ratio of spam Postini encountered increased from 65 percent to over 80. Full Story
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