E-mail spam. Statistics and estimates

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The growth of e-mail spam
Spam is growing exponentially, with no signs of abating. The amount of spam users see in their mailboxes is just the tip of the iceberg, since spammers' lists often contain a large percentage of invalid addresses.
In absolute numbers
1978 - An e-mail spam is sent to 600 addresses.
1994 - First large-scale spam sent to 6000 newsgroups, reaching millions of people.
2005 - (June) 30 billion per day
2006 - (June) 55 billion per day
2006 - (December) 85 billion per day
2007 - (February) 90 billion per day
As a percentage of the total volume of e-mail
MAAWG estimates that 80-85% of incoming mail is "abusive email", as of the last quarter of 2005. The sample size for the MAAWG's study was over 100 million mailboxes. Highest amount of spam received
According to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft founder Bill Gates receives four million e-mails per year, most of them being spam.(This was originally incorrectly reported as "per day")
At the same time Jef Poskanzer, owner of the domain name acme.com, was receiving over one million spam emails per day.
Origin of spam
Origin or source of spam refers to the geographical location of the computer from which the spam is sent; it is not the country where the spammer resides, nor the country that hosts the spamvertised site. Due to the international nature of spam, often the spammer, the hijacked spam-sending computer, the spamvertised server, and the user target of the spam are all located in different countries.
In terms of volume of spam: According to Sophos, the major sources of spam in the first quarter of 2007 (January to March) were the United States (the origin of 19.8% of spam messages), followed by China (7.5%) and Poland (7.4%). When grouped by continents, spam comes mostly from Europe (35%), Asia (33%), and North America (23%). Overall volume has increased 4% in the last year.
In terms of number of IP addresses: The Spamhaus Project (which measures spam sources in terms of number of IP addresses used for spamming, rather than volume of spam sent) ranks the top three as the United States, China, and Russia, with South Korea placed at #6 behind Japan and Canada.
In terms of networks: As of 5 June 2007, the three networks hosting the most spammers are Verizon, AT&T, and VSNL International. Verizon inherited many of these spam sources from its acquisition of MCI, specifically through the UUNet subsidiary of MCI, which Verizon subsequently renamed Verizon Business.
Spamvertised sites Most spam contains a URL to a website. According to a Commtouch report in June 2004, "only five countries are hosting 99.68% of the global spammer websites", of which the foremost is China, hosting 73.58% of all web sites referenced within spam.
Most common products advertised According to information compiled by Spam-Filter-Review.com, E-mail spam for 2006 can be broken down as follows.
Products - 25%
Financial - 20%
Adult - 19%
Scams - 9%
Health - 7%
Internet - 7%
Leisure - 6%
Spiritual - 4%
Other - 3%
Pornography alone accounted for 2.5 billion daily emails sent in 2006, equating to 4.5 daily porn emails per person.

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