Spam: How much do we get?

A massive 96 per cent of us have received spam emails - or to put it another way, a lucky one in 25 email users are free from the inbox clutter of unsolicited email.

A survey by silicon.com to coincide with the launch of 'The Spam Report' revealed that almost all email users have received spam at some time.

And it's not just the occasional email either. The majority of respondents receive between 11 and 100 spam emails per day, broken down as: 28 per cent receiving between 11 and 25 spam emails per day; 19 per cent receiving between 26 and 50, and 9 per cent receiving between 51 and 100.

Furthermore, 5.2 per cent of respondents claim to receive in excess of 101 unsolicited emails per day - slightly more than the 3.9 per cent of respondents who claim to be blissfully spam free.

According to Enrique Salem, CEO of anti-spam vendor Brightmail, whose company processes 63 million emails per month, the type of company you work for can have a massive impact on the amount of spam you receive.

"While the average figure we are seeing shows about 48 per cent of email traffic is spam, in some sectors this is far higher - even reaching as high as 79 per cent," said Salem. "The problem comes where business have email addresses available in the public domain. Also high profile companies are exposed to increased levels of spam."

Salem cited companies such as banks and ISPs as among those most notably in the firing line.

One of the biggest problems facing recipients of spam is a dent in productivity. Almost two per cent of respondents to the silicon.com survey confessed to spending more than one hour per day ploughing through spam. That's a massive five hours per working week or 240 hours per year, the equivalent of a six-week holiday.

While the majority aren't losing quite so much time 82 per cent of respondents are still spending as much as an hour and a half each week dealing with the problem of spam cluttering up their inboxes, while eight per cent are spending between one-and-half and five hours each week.