While there always undoubtedly will be plenty of spam to weed out of your inbox every day, there now will be less adult email, according to Symantec's latest spam report.
The report states that during the month of February, porn spam hit an all-time low. Of all the spam filtered by Symantec's email security tools in February, "only 3 percent could be classified as adult spam," the company reported Tuesday.
Symantec creates its report based on emails filtered through its proprietary security tools. Adult spam, as defined by Symantec, contains or refers to "products or services intended for persons "above the age of 18" and is "often offensive or inappropriate." Examples of adult spam included porn websites, personal ads, and relationship advice.
"The top spam categories are health care or other general product ads, which—combined—account for 48 percent of all junk email," according to Symantec. Other top spam categories include advertisements for financial services (21 percent) and Internet services (15 percent), according to the Symantec report. Of all junk messages, "8 percent was fraudulent or part of a scam such as phishing."
Spammers will continue to tweak their approaches to get past filters. Symantec noted in its study that image spam now includes "slanted text," which refers to an image with embedded spam text rather than plain text in the message. "This technique may decrease the detection capabilities," the report read.
