Spam, also known as unsolicited bulk Email (UBE), junk mail, or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), has been a growing problem since the Internet was opened to the public in the mid 1990s. Today, it makes up around 80-85% all of e-mail. The origins of spam messages have been studied more closely over the past decade.

Traditionally, spam was sent generated and distributed via so-called “marketing” companies. They owned or leased their own equipment and operated on their own. As anti-spam software and services became more advanced that method quickly became an in-effective means of delivering spam to mailboxes. As anti-spam methods became smarter so did the spammers.

Today most spam originates from infected computers all around the world. Computers infected with viruses are able to “phone home” to a central server or computer that can relay spam messages through infected computers. These systems are known as “bot-nets.” This makes spam detection much harder as the messages do not originate from the same source. Spam filtering software or services must then look at messages and sources to effectively mark messages as spam.

Spam also originates for servers or services running outside the United States. China, Korea, and other Asian countries are all popular sources for spam. Orlando Tech Works provides extremely accurate spam filtering on all shared hosting packages.