Look Both Ways

Assessing the Risks

In addition to the huge annoyance factor, spam undermines your confidence in e-mail and opens you up to many fraudulent ploys. One FTC report indicated that 66 percent of spam contained "false or misleading information in the sender line, subject line, or message content."

Spam also drives enormous costs on to service providers who have to gear up to handle the billions of spam communications sent daily. Development teams have to constantly create new rules to try to block the deluge in a seemingly never-ending cycle as spammers find new holes to crawl through. For example, MSN Hotmail blocks over 3.2 billion spam messages every day. Over 90 percent of incoming messages are spam, and Hotmail’s filtering processes catch over ...