SoCalScribe's Scandalous Scribbles

spam

PROMPT: What's in your SPAM folder?


I actually don't have anything in my spam folder at the moment. I empty it out on a daily basis, partly to check and make sure that nothing important got sent there by mistake, and partly because I hate seeing a number of unread messages anywhere in my email. I probably get about 20-30 spam emails during the course of the day, and just delete them first thing in the morning and throughout the day whenever a few of them pop up.

Out of curiosity about this topic, I did a little casual research (i.e. Wikipedia). According to Wikipedia, pharmaceutical spam accounts for 81% of all spam messages out there. I knew there were a lot of spam emails about herbal supplements and vitamins and prescription drugs, but I didn't realize that eight in ten spam emails were on the topic. Next most popular is replica products spam at 5.4%, then enhancers at 2.9%, phishing at 2.3%, degree programs at 1.3%, casinos at 1%, weight loss at 0.4%, and all others at 6.30%.

Spam accounts for nearly 78% of all email sent, with approximately seven trillion spam messages sent in the 2011 calendar year.

In 2011, Cisco published a report that listed the spam volume by country. India was at the top of the list with 13.9%, followed by Russia's 9%, Vietnam's 7.9%, South Korea's 6.0%, Indonesia's 6.0%, China's 4.7%, Brazil's 4.5%, and the United States' 3.2% The United States' numbers are down considerably after the closure of McColo in 2008. McColo was a San Jose-based web hosting service provider run by a Russian hacker that - at the time of its takedown - was estimated to be responsible for nearly two-thirds of all spam in the world. Statistical data by SpamCop shows that before McColo was terminated, the worldwide average for spam being sent was routinely between 20 and 40 emails per second.

I was hoping for a really cool ending to this blog post by being able to say, "And in the time it took me to write this blog post, I received X new spam messages!" But sadly (or happily, depending on how you look at it), that number is still zero.