Calling 2004 a “banner year in the fight against spam,” America Online Inc. on Monday announced that junk e-mail to its members has declined by more than 75 percent, based on the number of spam reports it got in November compared with the same month last year.
In November 2003, AOL averaged almost 11 million spam reports every day directly from members, the company said. As of November 2004, that figure had declined to about 2.2 million spam reports daily from members.
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The drop makes 2004 the first year with a “substantial and consistent” decline in spam since 1999, the company said. Spam dropped temporarily in 2003, AOL said, but it was short-lived, and spam hit record levels soon after. AOL has been tracking spam since 1996.
Most members report spam using the popular “Report Spam” button, helping AOL constantly update and fine-tune its anti-spam filters minute-by-minute.
AOL said it has also seen “substantial declines” in the amount of mail being diverted to AOL members’ spam folder. In November 2003, the amount of spam being diverted to this folder averaged about 100 million per day; that number, as of November 2004, has declined to 40 million spam e-mails per day – a 60-percent drop.
In addition, the average daily amount of Internet spam e-mails that are blocked at the gateway by AOL antispam filters has declined sharply – a 50-percent drop – from a peak of about 2.4 billion in 2003, to an average daily volume of just 1.2 billion blocked spam e-mails in late 2004.
Finally, AOL noted that fewer attempts are being made to send e-mail from the Internet to AOL members, with the daily average number of attempts dropping from 2.1 billion recipient messages in November 2003 to 1.6 billion recipient messages in November 2004.
AOL said it believes this 22-percent drop in attempted e-mails to be almost entirely spam – as many spammers give up on efforts to get junk mail past AOL’s filters.
AOL credited the decline in spam to improved technical anti-spam countermeasures by AOL’s AntiSpam Operations and Postmaster teams, as well as stepped-up enforcement actions undertaken by government authorities and by AOL under tougher federal and state anti-spam laws, such as the new federal CAN-SPAM law, which went into effect in January 2004.
“The bottom line based on this great news is, We’re opening up a new, better chapter in the story about spam,” said Carl Hutzler, director of anti-spam operations, in a news release. “The gap between the amount of good e-mail AOL delivers, and the bad e-mail members might get, has never been wider than it is today on AOL.”
In 2004, AOL took several measures to reduce spam, including more robust anti-spam tools in its AOL 9.0 Security Edition software, several legal enforcement actions, advocacy of state anti-spam laws, and efforts to fight e-mail spoofing and scams.
Earlier this year, AOL gave away a spammer’s Porsche Boxster sportscar – confiscated as part of a legal settlement – to a member in a service-wide sweepstakes.
