AI Arms Race: the evolving battle between email spam and spam filters

Most email users will be unaware of this, but there is an Arms Race taking place behind the scenes of their inbox. In 2023, our security systems registered an average of 1.5 billion spam or phishing emails every single week. In the same period the previous year, the figure was 1.2 billion messages. Spam messages have increased by 25% in just one year. Despite these huge numbers, the vast majority of spam and phishing emails still never even reach the user’s inbox. That is a huge amount of messages to process and filter. Imagine how clogged email inboxes would be if email providers did not commit significant resources every year to detect and filter out these potentially dangerous emails.

The sad truth is that, as long as there is money to be made, scammers will always exist. Email scammers are no different. They are continually innovating to find new ways to trick people into sharing personal information, installing malware or making an erroneous payment. Spam has come a long way from the poor design and clumsy writing of those earliest messages. Today’s spam mails are often professionally designed and cover a wide range of topics. They increasingly latch onto the latest money-making trends such as cryptocurrency or forex trading, use messages that are intended to intimidate or frighten the recipient, or even appeal to their conscience by posing as a charity whenever a natural disaster or conflict is prominent in the news cycle.

“Hey ChatGPT, let’s make some spam”