The number of junk attachments to business e-mail has declined over the past six months, compared with the same period last year, according to a new study.
For every 4,756 business e-mails sent from March to August, just one contained an offending or nonwork-related attachment, such as pornography, cartoons, jokes and greeting cards. That's compared with a 1,357-1 ratio in the same period last year, according to a study from e-mail security firm MessageLabs.
The company could not say for certain what caused the drop but speculated that stricter enforcement of corporate policies could be helping.
MessageLabs also noted a fall in spam and viruses in circulation in August. Of all messages scanned by the company that month, 84.2 percent were spam, compared with 94.5 percent in July. About 6.9 percent of e-mails were found infected with a virus during August, compared with 7.3 percent the previous month.
"The summer months are often a quiet time for virus and spam distribution--despite exceptions like last August's SoBig.F virus. Virus activity tends to be cyclical, with periods of stability punctuated by outbreaks of varying significance," Mark Sunner, chief technology officer of MessageLabs, said in a statement.
"The drop in spam volumes may also be partly as a result of the United States' Operation Web Snare, during which more than 150 people were arrested for a variety of online criminal activities, including spamming," Sunner said.
Unsolicited material sent over e-mail has emerged as a major problem for businesses and home Internet users. According to researcher IDC, spam accounted for 38 percent of the 31 billion e-mails sent each day in North America in 2004.
Since the arrests of a number of spammers a month or two ago, the volume of spam I get has fallen by about 50%. There's certainly more work to do about pursuing spammers, but the recent legal action helped.
Google creates an animated doodle that features a boy, a girl, Google's search engine, and a jump rope. But might there be darker, more analytical, more troubling interpretations to this tale?
The Silicon Valley online payments startup grew by 1,000 percent last year and is hopeful it can repeat that level of growth this year. To do that, it's had to move away from its early friends-and-family roots and embrace small businesses.
Chamtech's spray-on antenna uses a nano material to provide a low-power boost to antenna range. The wireless-in-a-can product may some day bring an end to unsightly cell towers.
EnerG2 opens a plant to make an engineered carbon that will improve performance of energy storage devices and make storage for start-stop hybrid cars less expensive.
