Who gets the most spam?

If you work in the IT and telecoms sector then you will be no stranger to spam with around 45 per cent of all email consisting of unsolicited emails.

However, the tech sector is far from the worst affected - manufacturing and engineering, healthcare, legal and chemical and pharmaceutical are all faring far worse in the spam stakes.

Hardest hit are those working in the healthcare sector, where a staggering 68 per cent of all email is spam. Second come workers in the legal field, where still more than half the email received (52 per cent) is spam, as measured by email filtering specialist MessageLabs. Both industries are very public facing, which is single biggest source of the problem, according to Paul Wood, chief information analyst at MessageLabs.

"Lawyers for example have to be contactable and their email addresses will be well-publicised," said Wood. But by advertising email addresses, particularly online, companies are increasing their exposure to spam, as addresses are harvested by software designed to crawl websites in search of addresses.

The results in part reflect the different levels of email use within these sectors, according to Wood. While IT and telecoms probably receive far more spam than other sectors, the high levels of essential email also circulating means the percentage is kept lower than with sectors such as healthcare.

However, that makes the level of spam no less important as a metric. For healthcare professionals to be receiving spam with every seven in 10 emails puts a severe dent in productivity, according to Wood.

"This problem is in part due to cuts in IT spending," said Wood, highlighting healthcare - particularly public sector healthcare - as one area where IT budgets have been slashed in recent years. "But if businesses in these areas do not implement solutions, and start tackling the problem of spam then they will certainly start feeling the far greater costs of dealing with spam over the long term."

Wood pointed to lost productivity, with staff dealing with spam, as a cost which many companies can now readily quantify. He added that many companies as such are now realising the long-term savings outweigh the initial investment.

Ironically the retail sector, arguably the largest single source of unsolicited email, gets off the lightest, with a mere three per cent - a level most of us can only dream of.

The pharmaceutical industry, where spam accounts for almost 50 per cent of email, is in part a victim of spam by necessity, or design.

With so much spam offering pharmaceutical products - from generic Viagra to miracle weight loss pills - exposure to spam is a natural bi-product of involvement within the sector.

Martino Corbelli, marketing director at SurfControl, said: "If you work in the pharmaceutical sector then you probably have more interest in spam than most. If you work for Pfizer [manufacturer of Viagra] for example, and you hear that people are marketing generic, or natural Viagra, then you probably want to see what it is they're offering."