Report: U.S. Has 4th Highest Spam Rate

Chances are when you come back from the Christmas holiday, your email inbox will be filled with spam messages promising pharmaceutical miracles or incredibly low stock prices. Why? Because even with a drop in the number of spam messages received, the United States has the fourth-highest spam rate in the world.

by Kristina Knight

Isreal has more spam than any other country according to a new report from Message Labs. In 2006, Isreal’s spam rate 75.2%, India followed closely with 75.1% spam rate and spam messages in Hong Kong rose to 71.7% (up from 61.6% in 2005). The U.S. was a distant fourth with spam delivery decreasing to 63.5% (down from 77% in 2005). Ireland rounded out the Top 5 with 60.6% spam (down from 67.3% in 2005).

One positive trend from the November report is that viruses and phishing attacks were down slightly on a global level. Only 1 in 137.5 emails contained a virus, that is down .27% since October. Phishing attacks were also down in November, with 1 in 200 emails containing phishing information. That is a decrease of .03%. However, as a whole, phishing attacks are up. According to the report, “. . .68.6% of all malicious emails intercepted by MessageLabs in November were phishing attacks, an increase of 15.7% on the previous month.”

Don’t expect the downturn in the numbers of spam, viruses or phishing attacks to continue. The world is fully into the holiday shopping season, which means people can expect more frequent attempts by phishers and spammers to obtain personal information.

Tags: email marketing, phishing, spam

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It looks like people is starting to accept spam, viruses and phishing as a fact of life. But on a technical medium like email there is always a technical solution, we just have to keep working... Consider an alternative: EmailXT EmailXT is an email protocol that builds on top of the existing infrastructure. How can we stop spam and viruses using EmailXT? Install a compatible application. It looks unbelievably simple, but it is that simple. All it needs is adoption. And no, it does not require cooperation from everybody at once... However, being a more complex system than current email, it does require users to manage more than just simple email addresses. For those who want to try it out, go to www.emailxt.com and download the client app. Watch out for the bugs because it's still an alpha version. Actually you need two installations so that you can test email send/receive. And you can try it on your spam-filled mailbox. My contribution in search of a solution... JS

Posted by: Jorge Santos on December 20, 2006 11:27