Spam levels skyrocket in UK
Published: 25 Nov 2002 13:09 GMT
UK email users have seen a dramatic rise in the amount of spam clogging their in-boxes during 2002, according to new figures released by email security company MessageLabs.
One in every eight email messages in the UK currently contains spam, according to MessageLabs' estimates -- up from one in every 199 just last January. Judging by US trends, there is likely to be worse ahead: across the pond, one in three emails is an unsolicited bulk advertisement.
"Six to nine months ago, spam was seen as a minor annoyance or an inconvenience, but nowadays people are beginning to see that it is a serious productivity problem," said," said MessageLabs chief technical officer Mark Sunner.
He said that spammers methods for avoiding filtering tools have also been growing increasingly sophisticated, including polymorphic spams that change slightly to avoid static filters. "There's definitely an arms race between those sending spam and the filtering organisations," he said.
MessageLabs provides managed email services for customers around Europe, the US and Hong Kong, and the figures are tallied from its email processing engines. The company said it has, on average, stopped 45 spam messages a minute so far in 2002.
Spam is an increasingly thorny issue for businesses, with MessageLabs estimating that 10 percent of users' working day is spent dealing with unwanted messages. The new figures are likely to add fuel to the debate over what to do about junk email. Various legal remedies are under discussion, but in the mean time many ISPs and companies have turned to automatic spam filters. These, however, can keep legitimate mail from reaching its audience.
Besides losing productivity, spam has increasingly caused damage by distributing viruses or scams. MessageLabs said that the so-called "Nigerian scam", also called the "419 scam", was the fastest-growing threat of the year.
The scam messages typically request help in transferring a large amount of money out of Nigeria, and the victim is lured into contributing a sizeable sum in order to help the process along, expecting to meet the scammer in a hotel later on to receive their cut. The UK National Criminal Intelligence Service estimates that each day up to five Americans are waiting in London hotel lobbies for such fictional meetings.
"It is absolutely gobsmacking how many people are taken in by this," Sunner said. "But if you look at the scale of this, you can start to see how it works. Tens of millions of these messages are sent out, so even if only 0.1 percent respond, it's still a lot of people."
Email software makers have been forced to build more sophisticated spam filters into their products. Microsoft's Outlook and Apple's Mail application have recently added new filters.
MessageLabs' data comes a few weeks after research from several email companies found that spam could make up the majority of emails by the end of the year.
Some advertisers have recently begun bypassing email entirely and feeding pop-up messages directly onto the desktop via a feature in Windows.
September was the worst month in the UK for spam, with one in five emails counting as junk, MessageLabs said. The best month was February, where spam levels dipped to one in 251.
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