Symantec's State of Spam report: Spam rates declining

Here's something that should make messaging folks happier (as happy as you can be at this point given the DST 2007 huddle a lot of us may find ourselves in... :) Symantec's monthly State of Spam report shows some interesting trends over the past month.

In particular:
1. Overall percentage of spam "at the SMTP layer" declined to 69% in January 2007
2. Image spam reached an overall high of 45% but ended the month of January at 30%
3. Interestingly, "adult spam" is declining!

Interesting finds, though they may not echo the spam statistics from mail servers in your organization. Also note, the above does not represent anything blocked at the network layer - for instance, using techniques like Connection Filtering. It's unclear whether Symantec considers connections or messages blocked by the use of Real-Time Block Lists (RBLs) as being network layer or SMTP layer - a good portion of spam is blocked by using RBLs, imo.

Further, according to the report, North America still leads the world as the region where the highest amount of spam originates from.

Download Symantec's The State of Spam report (PDF, no registration required, short - 7 pages) from symantec.com.