Spam volume slumped at the end of the year

THE NUMBER of spam emails slumped at the end of the year, according to people who spend their time watching it.

Commtouch said that there was an 18 per cent drop in global spam levels between September and October. It attributed the drop to the closure of Spamit, which was behind a fair amount of the world's pharmacy spam.

While spammers are usually pretty quick to pick up the slack of one of their number falling, Commtouch said that there was a further drop in spam numbers in December.

December's daily average was around 30 per cent less than September's, which means that the average spam level for the quarter was 83 per cent, down from 88 per cent in the third quarter of 2010.

What they believe is that the nature of spam attacks has changed. Before October there were large fluctuations in the amounts of spam sent.

However in this quarter, aside from two large outbreaks in mid-October and mid-December, spam levels have been fairly even.

The outfit warns that spam has a nasty habit of coming back with a vengeance so it is never a good idea to celebrate too early. µ