Spam declining?

An article in Computerworld indicates that spam has shown a decline since mid-2004. This accords with what seems to have been happening in my own inboxes. Perhaps, even with botnets, it has stopped being profitable to tout Vigaria, V*I*A*G*R*A, low, LOW mortgage rates, etc. Here's hoping.

Global rates of spam, viruses and phishing e-mails stagnated in the last month, managed e-mail provider MessageLabs Ltd. has reported.

Month-on-month, levels for all three problems mostly stayed where they had been in the previous month. Spam rates actually decreased slightly from January, falling from 66.6% to 60.6%, while viruses fell from one in 41.7 e-mails to one in 44.1, or 2.3% of traffic. Only phishing saw any increase but this was modest, rising from one in 395 to one in 335.

The company predicts that spam might rise in the short term, although this is after a marked and consistent decline since a peak in July 2004, when the company said 94.5% of its e-mail traffic was made up of spam.