Who’s Behind the Spam Surge?

Written By
Larry Seltzer
Larry Seltzer
Published: Dec 17, 2006
Updated: May 12, 2021
1 minute read

As I discussed several weeks ago, everyone’s seen that there has been a massive surge in spam over the last couple of months. More researchers are weighing in on what’s behind it.

One point many sources make, and I made in my last column, is that there was a “Christmas Spike” last year too. Spam shot up roughly from November 2005 through January 2006 and then tailed off until the late ’06 surge, yielding a bowl-shaped curve for the year.

Will this year have a tail-off in February too? Ask me in March, but the people at MessageLabs don’t expect to see one. They see a steadily increasing spam load through 2007, pushing the limits of our tolerance.

Like Postini, with which I talked for my last column, MessageLabs is a hosted secure mail vendor. Such vendors process a tremendous amount of e-mail to and from areas all over the world (Postini was the biggest last time I checked).

Read the full story on eWeek.com: Who’s Behind the Spam Surge?

Larry Seltzer

Larry Seltzer

Content Writer

Larry Seltzer has been writing software for and English about computers ever since—,much to his own amazement— He was one of the authors of NPL and NPL-R, fourth-generation languages for microcomputers by the now-defunct DeskTop Software Corporation. (Larry is sad to find absolutely no hits on any of these +products on Google.) His work at Desktop Software included programming the UCSD p-System, a virtual machine-based operating system with portable binaries that pre-dated Java by more than 10 years.For several years, he wrote corporate software for Mathematica Policy Research (they're still in business!) and Chase Econometrics (not so lucky) before being forcibly thrown into the consulting market. He bummed around the Philadelphia consulting and contract-programming scenes for a year or two before taking a job at NSTL (National Software Testing Labs) developing product tests and managing contract testing for the computer industry, governments and publication.In 1991 Larry moved to Massachusetts to become Technical Director of PC Week Labs (now eWeek Labs). He moved within Ziff Davis to New York in 1994 to run testing at Windows Sources. In 1995, he became Technical Director for Internet product testing at PC Magazine and stayed there till 1998.Since then, he has been writing for numerous other publications, including Fortune Small Business, Windows 2000 Magazine (now Windows and .NET Magazine), ZDNet and Sam Whitmore's Media Survey.

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