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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/thespamreport/0,39025001,39125801,00.htm

Is spam being fried?
Brightmail figures offer some hope...

By Dan Ilett

Published: Wednesday 10 November 2004

The rate at which spammers are sending junk mail around the internet appears to be stabilising.

For the last three months, the amount of spam sent around the world has evened off at 66 per cent of all email, according to statistics from Symantec Brightmail.

The company was unavailable to comment on the figures at the time of writing, but the statistics do indicate that anti-spam technology and laws could be having an effect on the junk mail problem.

The proportion of all email that is spam has steadily increased from 48 per cent of email in March 2003 to the two-thirds mark today.

Just over 60 per cent of today's spam was generated in North America, with almost a quarter (23 per cent) of junk mail originating in Asia. European spammers followed in third place, accounting for 11 per cent of the email, dwarfing Australasia and South America, which only produced a small amount of spam.

Product-related spam accounted for 30 per cent of the UK's junk email, while it was a quarter of worldwide spam. Financial spam was just under one-fifth (19 per cent) of the UK's figures, while pornographic email seemed to have dropped this month to 13 per cent of the total.

Dan Ilett writes for ZDNet UK.