AOL reports on a considerable spam decline for the year… check out that graph – those are BILLIONS of emails. And it’s just AOL…
Time Warner Inc. unit America Online said it has seen a big decline in overall junk e-mail volume this year, in a reversal of a five-year escalation in spam aimed at AOL members. AOL said the decline is evidence that its efforts to fight spam are working.
“We used to be the largest target,” said AOL spokesman Nicholas J. Graham. “The target’s becoming a lot smaller,” in the face of aggressive filtering and spammer prosecutions that have made sending junk mail to AOL members less financially rewarding, he said.
In late 2004, AOL blocked half as much spam at the front door of its network as it blocked in the worst point of 2003, when it stopped about 2.4 billion e-mails a day, the company said. And the number of messages diverted to members’ “Spam Folders” fell 60% to 40 million a day in November compared with a year earlier. The drop in spam helped reduce AOL’s overall e-mail load by 22%, AOL said. [WSJ]