With more than two and a half terabytes of spam landing in our inboxes daily, Alan Rowe takes a look at some of the real statistics.
Industry experts say the Internet will ‘die’ unless the current avalance of spam is stopped in its tracks.
According to statistics released by insideSpam.com, of the 31 billion emails sent daily, 40 per cent of it is considered to be spam. Thats 12.4 Billion spam emails sent daily. Even if we take off Bill Gates 4 million daily spam messages, that leaves a heck of a lot of spam for us.
Slightly scarier, Vircom, a leading anti-spam software provider has estimated the cost of spam to enterprises to be $1400US per mailbox per year.
The way Vircom did this is to set up several groups of email accounts. One group had 250 users, the second had 500 users, the third had 1000 users and the last had 5000 users.
Each group was made to emulate the activities of an average enterprise, signing some addresses up for forums, newsletters and newsgroups. The experiment lasted for six months.
At the end of the six month period, each email address was receiving an average of 19.31 spam messages per day.
Worse, because of the way the spam seemed to increase, Vircom expected each email address in the experiment to be receiving just under 66 spam emails per day by the end of a 12 month period of normal use.
Vircom acknowledge that it can be difficult to estimate the cost of spam in monetary terms so have factored in details such as the need for increased storage space, bandwidth consumption, loss of productivity and the potential for harm. All that adds up to $1400US per email address.
Also according to Vircom’s white paper, we can see that spammers like to have weekends too. More than 85 per cent of spam is generated between Monday and Friday. Going by InsideSpam’s figures, the ‘weekenders’ generate only 1.86 billion spam messages over the weekend. Some more figures to think about:
- The United States is by far the largest generator of spam emails, with 60.42 per cent of all spam originating there. China is the next largest generator of spam.
- Of the various categories, spam advertising products was the most prevalent with nearly 36 per cent of all spam falling into this category. Adult related spam was the next largest contributor with 31.7 per cent and spam relating to financial matters in the third most popular group, with 26.53 per cent coming from that category.
- Interestingly, scams and fraud made up only 2.23 per cent of the spam mail. Of that figure though, identity theft – known as phishing – made up an astounding 73 per cent of scam emails. To put those figures into real terms, of the 31 billion emails sent daily, 12.4 billion are spam emails. Just over 27.5 million of those are scam and fraud related and just over 20 million of those are phishing expeditions. Per day.
- To put an even more interesting spin on that, Vircom have found that just over 86.5 per cent of spam email weighs in at 5kb or less. If we take the mean of that to be about 2.5kb that works out to just over 12.5 billion emails of around 2.5kb. Multiply that out and we have over 2.5 terabytes of spam emails floating around the internet every day.
No wonder industry experts are saying “Stop spam or the internet dies”.
Just as a by the way, “opting out” doesn’t work either. The rate of spam the control groups received actually increased when an “opt out” link was followed. More than 85 per cent of the spam emails offering an opt out mechanism had forged links or email addresses.
In addition to this, replying to the message and sending a polite “Please do not send me any more of this” email increased the amount of spam received vy a staggering 192 per cent. Worse than that though, sending a not so polite “remove me from your list you scum bag” email increased the amount of spam received by just over 300 per cent.
So. Whats the answer? Vircom advises the following steps:
- Never respond to spam;
- Never opt out of spam;
- Never click on a link in a spam message;
- Use a variety of email addresses;
- Be prudent when giving out email addresses;
- Never buy a product from a spammer;
- Always use a spam filter.
Oh and by the way – good luck.
Source
www.vircom.com
Alan Rowe www.simplydesigns.co.uk
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