Study: 9 in 10 delivered emails are spam

Spam isn't just clogging up personal email inboxes any longer. According to the latest research from ProofPoint, 9 in 10 emails delivered to business email addresses in November were spam. Which means workers are spending more and more time with email than ever.

by Kristina Knight

Though the overall spam rate dropped slightly (from an 89% spam rate in October to an 88% spam rate in November) businesses are still being inundated with junk mail.

Image-based spam rose for the second month in a row to reach nearly 10% of the total spam volume. That is an increase of 23% over October numbers. Meanwhile Microsoft Word (.doc-based) spam rose more than 60% in November to reach 4.74% of the total spam volume. Document spam in the .rtf format also saw growth for the month and grew more than 200%.

Spam in PDF formats increased by more than 100% for the month. MP3 formatted spam declined by just over 33%.

What this means for email marketers is that they need to be more diligent than ever in keeping email lists updated and ensuring that messages that are sent out are properly marked. With so many businesses receiving increasing amounts of spam it is more likely that messages will automatically be deleted, so keeping messages to the point and making sure that the message is delivered to a specific recipient rather than a general mailbox could help in reception and open rates.