A Ministry of Transport and Communications' (LVM) release based news item was published recently, that claimed that the amount of spam
deliveries had been reduced. LVM claimed that on the year 2003 junk e-mail amounted to 80% of the total e-mail traffic, whereas in the
year 2005 the amount was only 1/3.
Minister Susanna Huovinen attributed the ability to control the situation to the determined action. Unfortunately the claims are
without merit.
The amount of spam is hard to measure and the results depend on the measuring methods and the definition of spam. You can get ballpark figures, though, and they don't support the ministry's claims.
For example from the e-mail traffic to Helsinki University at least 80-90 % of the messages is either blocked because of the sending party or classified as spam because of analysis of the contents of the message, and if anything the percentage hasn't been going down within a couple of years. The situation is similar in other organizations as well.
It is good that there is pretty determined legislative work as well as technical measures to battle spam. Unfortunately the problem cannot be even brushed under carpet with Finnish actions alone since the problem recognizes no borders as is the nature of the internet.
There needs to be effective measures especially in the USA, therefore it would be in the best interest of Finland to put more and more emphasis on international co-operation.
Battling spam requires still considerable equipment and personnel resources and there is no reason to think that the problem is going away, which is agreed by the leading specialists internationally. Therefore we wish that the Ministry would stick to the facts in its' communiqués.
JUKKA HUHTA
IT specialist
IT Department
University of Helsinki
ATRO TOSSAVAINEN
Systems Analyst
The Institute of Biotechnology
University of Helsinki
The above is the whole text of the letter published by Helsingin Sanomat, translated to English by Esa Laitinen and Jukka Huhta.
To understand the above better, the reader needs to know that the Ministry of Transport and Communications published 13.12.2005 a
press release, which was based on information security comittee report. The press release claims for example:
Approximately 80% of all the e-mail messages delivered in 2003 was spam, this year only 1/3.
- The diminishing amount of spam shows that you can affect the by products of Internet, states the Minister of Transport and
Communications Susanna Huovinen.
Later the EU Commission published the same flawed piece of information.
Nowadays the situation has obviously changed after the explosion of pump and dump and image spam in autumn 2006.
Published Dec 1st 2006 by Jukka Huhta.
Last modified Dec 1st 2006.
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