PR Nonsense: High-tech global PR and other detritus

According to today’s New York Times article by Brad Stone, Spam Back to 94% of All E-mail, spam is on the rise again after the McColo Corp crisis back in November.  Stone reports that just “this year, average spam volumes have increased about 1.2% each day.”

Yikes!  So what are people doing to combat this problem?

One solution I recently found was from an email I received indicating that my intended recipient’s inbox was protected by ChoiceMail One, a DigiPortal Software product.  Since my email address was not on their list of “approved senders,” it needed verification.  It asked me to verify that I did in fact send the email by entering my name, my reason for sending the email, and then a verification code to ensure I am a real live person and not a spamming virus.  And the good news is, the ChoiceMail One email didn’t look like spam!

This was the first email I had received like that, but I’m sure as spam levels continue to increase, there will be more and more anti-spam software on the market.  For now, at least, my Gmail account does a pretty good job of filtering out spam through Postini, an anti-spam company and division of Google, which just release some interesting data from their Spam data and trends: Q1 2009 piece posted today.

Here’s hoping spam predictions will soon be on the decline, but in the mean time, happy anti-spamming!