4 January 2008

AMSTERDAM – There has never been so much spam recorded in the Netherlands as in the last month of 2007. 96 percent of all email consisted of unsolicited advertising.

This has been reported by spam fighting company Cleanport, which has been keeping an eye on spam in the Netherlands since 2003. Cleanport's conclusion is in line with the findings of other spam fighters, who had warned earlier of a wave of commercial messages during the holidays.

The percentage of spam for the whole of 2007 was 91.9 percent, Cleanport says. The company expects this percentage to rise in 2008.

Although spam is an increasingly large proportion of total email volume, it causes relatively little nuisance to end users. The large majority of spam messages never reaches the addressee's mailbox but is intercepted by filters from internet providers or email software.

Spammers are always finding new ways to bypass filters however. In 2007 for instance they made a great deal of use of file attachments generally regarded as safe, like PDFs and MP3s. The advertising message was contained in the attachment rather than the mail itself. This makes the spam harder for filters to recognise.

[Copyright Expatica News 2008]

Subject: Dutch news