Symantec: Spam falls below 50% of all email for the first time since 2003

Good news for all of us who still have to use email: spam rates are dropping! In fact, junk messages now account for just 49.7 percent of all emails.

The latest figure comes from security firm Symantec’s June 2015 Intelligence Report, which notes this is the first time in over a decade that the rate has fallen below 50 percent. The last time the company recorded a similar spam rate was back in September 2003, or almost 12 years ago.

More specifically, Symantec saw 704 billion email messages sent in June, of which 353 billion were classified as spam. At one of the peaks of the spam epidemic, in June 2009, 5.7 trillion of the 6.3 trillion messages sent were spam, according to past data from Symantec.

The report uses Symantec clients to extrapolate the figure, so the actual rate could be a bit higher or lower. That said, the spam rate appears to be dropping: Symantec’s spam number was 52.1 percent in April and 51.5 percent in May.

The decline of spam is usually attributed to legal prosecution against botnets (including by major tech companies like Microsoft), faster reaction times by network providers, improved blocking, and better filtering. The main goal is to make the business less lucrative: If you can slash profit margins for a spammer, you can slash spam itself.

This is great news for not just email users but companies that are dedicated to fighting spam. Their business isn’t going away anytime soon, but they are making progress.

Other findings in the report, which talks about not just spam but security overall, include:

• 57.6 million new malware variants were created in June, up from 44.5 million pieces of malware created in May and 29.2 million in April.
• Ransomware attack has increased for the second month in a row and crypto-ransomware has reached its highest levels since December 2014.

You can read Symantec’s full 19-page report here: