There is a lot of spam zooming around the internet these days. According to a report released this month by Symantec, more of your email than ever before is spam:

Between July 1 and December 31, 2007, spam made up 71 percent of all email traffic monitored at the gateway, a 16 percent increase over the last six months of 2006, when 61 percent of email was classified as spam.

I can attest to an increase in the volume of spam email, not only in my personal email, but also at work. What is interesting, though, is that I don’t really see more spam at home, while I do see a noticeable increase in spam at work. I cannot speak to what commercial product is in use at the office (I thankfully don’t manage that), but my personal email is hosted by Google, via their Gmail service. They do a nice job of filtering out my spam.

Here’s how much I’ve received in just the last week or so:

The good news is that I don’t have to worry about having beefy enough servers to handle that load, and rarely am I bothered by spam that makes it past the filter. On the rare occasion that a bit of spam does make it through, I hit the Mark as Spam button and Google learns. It’s great!

There is also more to spam than email. Blog spam is another nasty form of spam, clogging web servers and web sites that allow comments, with links back to sites that can offend your sense of decency and/or host viruses. Thankfully, there is Aksimet. I’d be posting even less than I do now if I was always having to filter through all of these spam comments:

Google and Akismet do a great job of helping me lead a less spammy life. I hope your life isn’t very spammy either! I’d love to hear what others of you do out there to reduce the amount of spam at which you have to look.