Sickening spam stats

No surprise that the CAN-SPAM Act is deemed a failure by critics, but an IDG News Service status report does provide some eye-opening numbers about how much worse the spam problem has gotten since the law went into effect at the start of 2004:

Postini Inc., an e-mail security service provider, said the percentage of legitimate non-spam e-mail it sees dropped from 22 percent of all e-mail at the beginning of 2004 to just 12 percent by December. The company processes 2.4 billion e-mail messages a week.

MX Logic Inc., another antispam vendor, found 67 percent of all e-mail to be spam in February. By November, 75 percent of all e-mail was spam, according to MX Logic.