It's annoying, it's always in your inbox - and it's getting worse.
According to new reports by two anti-spam companies, the number of spam messages has doubled this year - up to 62 billion every day - and Penn students are beginning to feel the impact.
"In the past few months, spam has increased in volume greatly," said Duncan Findlay, a member of the Project Management Committee for SpamAssassin, the filter Penn uses.
"It's certainly an arms race," Findlay added. "I don't see there being a real solution to spam anytime soon."
But the School of Arts and Sciences' upcoming switch to either Google or Microsoft as a replacement for its current Webmail server may alleviate some of those very problems.
Vice Dean for Finance and Administration Ramin Sedehi said that the move will likely improve spam filtering for Penn e-mail accounts.
"They beat us hands down on this," Sedehi said.
The newest weapon in the spammers' arsenal is image spam. Spammers will send out an e-mail with two parts: one with completely innocuous text - an excerpt from a classic novel, for instance - and the other with an image including the spam message.
Spam messages are now used to run so-called stock market "pump-and-dump schemes," the same kind of spam that many Penn students have reported receiving.
As part of the scheme, a wave of spam messages is sent pushing a penny stock as a strong buy to fool people into artificially "pumping" up the price. Spammers then sell the stock, raking in profits and "dumping" the worthless shares into victims' hands.
"Organized crime is very involved in this now," Computer Science Department Chairman Fernando Pereira said, referring to the increase in fraudulent spam messages.
Interestingly, here at Penn spam seems only to hit the inboxes of upperclassmen, with the newly created e-mail accounts of freshman left untouched.
This is what's expected, Pereira said.
"Upperclassmen have had a Web presence for longer" and are thus more likely to have had their addresses harvested by spammers, he said.
Spammers often find their victims by picking out e-mail addresses that are made public by the users.
"The main thing is to keep your e-mail away from public places," Pereira said. "Putting your e-mail on social-networking sites is the kiss of death."
Facebook.com, however, should be more secure than sites like MySpace.com because it encodes user e-mails as images, and Facebook profiles are not accessible to those without accounts.
But Pereira said that, no matter how protective someone is of their e-mail address, spam will always be an issue.
No matter what, he said, "no spam filter is perfect."
