Outbound Spam: What It Is and Why It Matters

By Stephanie Jordan
in

Outbound spam is a growing problem. What is meant by outbound spam and how is it different from the spam you well know? According to Osterman Research, inbound spam has been a problem for about the past nine years and represents upwards of 80 percent of all email. Outbound spam, in Osterman Research’s view, is a rapidly growing problem for service providers who act as “unwilling hosts.”

In its paper The Growing Problem of Outbound Spam for Commtouch, Osterman notes “Outbound spam—that content sent from Web hosting companies, SaaS email providers, Internet access service providers, free email service providers, and onsite email managed service providers—creates enormous problems on a number of levels.”

Key outbound spam culprits are the zombie networks. Service providers, that participated in the survey for the whitepaper, report that 11.2 percent of their users’ accounts are currently part of a botnet that is being used for sending out spam, and 86 percent of the service providers report that they are actively battling zombies in their networks.

The statistic that interested me from the report was that of another source of outbound spam, the creation and use of email accounts specifically meant to send spam. Here it is: “The service providers we queried reported that one in eight users’ accounts are openly sending out spam and/or malware.” WIth a ratio like that it is easy to see why our email inboxes get inundated with spam.

The Osterman paper goes on to review some of the current tactics and solutions for dealing with the problem of outbound spam, the effects of outbound spam and its negative consequences, and finally what a good outbound spam solution looks like. To learn more, request the paper from Commtouch.

Published July 22, 2010