Outbound Spam Is a Growing Problem

By Michael Osterman
in

We have recently completed two major surveys for Commtouch focused on the growing problems associated with outbound spam—the spam that is generated by malicious users, zombies and compromised email accounts that emanates from Internet service providers, hosted email providers, free email providers, Web hosts, etc.

The first survey we conducted was with service providers to determine how seriously they view the problem of outbound spam, the second was with end users to see what kinds of problems they experience with regard to their use of email at home. If you’d like a copy of the survey report developed from this research, you can register to receive it at:

http://www.commtouch.com/forms/Register_OS_report?destination=thank-you-os-register&src=ostr

We will let the survey report provide the bulk of the findings, but there are a couple of results from the end user report we wanted to highlight here:

  • We asked end users to assume that their current email provider, in an attempt to block zombies or bots from sending out spam, blocked an entire IP address range (which many service providers do), meaning that some innocent users would have their outbound email blocked. We then asked them if they would choose a new provider if that provider would block only zombies or bots and not innocent users.

    12% of the end users we surveyed told us they would definitely switch to the new provider, while another 44% told us they would probably switch. Only 1% told us they would definitely not switch to the new provider.

  • In a similar finding, we found that 87% consider an email provider that actively blocks zombies and bots from their network to be important or extremely important to them; only 4% considered this to be unimportant to them.

The bottom line, as discussed in the survey report that you can access from the link above, is that outbound spam is a problem for service providers. However, it’s clearly a problem for end users as well. And, it’s a problem that will drive many of them to choose a service provider that manages the problem well.

Published June 2, 2010