Although it is almost impossible to know exactly how many spam emails are sent every day, we know the number is significant and that spam is not going away.
One reason that it is hard to know how many spam emails are sent is that many people do not understand the definition of spam email. (Hint: It is not simply any email you do not want to receive.) One definition says that, “An electronic message is “spam” if (A) the recipient’s personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (B) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent.” That means that if you asked to receive emails from an e-commerce site, but are now no longer interested, you should unsubscribe, but it is not spam. On the other hand, if you are receiving random emails about buying pharmaceuticals online, that is probably spam.
DataProt reported the following:
- Nearly 85% of all emails are spam.
- Email spam costs businesses $20.5 billion every year.
- Scams and fraud comprise only 2.5% of all spam email; however, phishing statistics indicate that identity theft makes up 73% of this figure.
- As many as 85% of all organizations were targeted by phishing scams in 2021.
- Microsoft accounts are the most popular targets of phishing emails, accounting for 43% of all phishing attempts.
According to spam statistics from Kaspersky in 2021:
- 45.56% of e-mails were spam.
- 24.77% of spam was sent from Russia with another 14.12% from Germany.
- Kaspersky’s Mail Anti-Virus blocked 148,173,261 malicious attachments sent in e-mails.
- Kaspersky’s Anti-Phishing system blocked 253,365,212 phishing links.
Although those statistics contradict each other, the bottom line is that there is a lot of spam email floating around the internet. Looking for ways to reduce the amount of unwanted email you receive (whether or not it is legally defined as spam)? The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency of the U.S. government recommends the following:
- Be careful about releasing your email address. Think twice before you respond to any request for your email address whether online, verbally, or on paper.
- Check privacy policies. Before giving your email address, look for a privacy policy.
- Be aware of options selected by default. When you sign up for some online accounts or services, there may be an option to receive email about other products and services. Sometimes these options are pre-selected, so if you do not deselect them you could be added to those lists as well.
- Use filters or spam tagging. Many email programs allow you to block certain addresses or to allow only email from addresses on your contact list.
- Report messages as spam. Most email clients offer an option to report spam messages. Reporting messages helps to train the email filter so that future messages aren’t delivered to your inbox. Be sure to check your junk or spam folders occasionally to look for messages that were incorrectly flagged as spam.
- Don’t click on links in spam messages. If you click a link within an email message you are confirming that your email address is valid. Do not click on the “unsubscribe” option in spam messages as this tells the spammer that the address is valid. (Do use the unsubscribe option if you actually subscribed but no longer wish to receive emails from that sender.)
- Disable the automatic downloading of graphics in HTML mail. Many spammers use graphics in HTML emails to track who opens the mail message. Disabling HTML mail entirely and viewing messages in plain text also prevents this problem.
- Get an additional email account. If you often submit your email address (for online shopping, signing up for services, etc.), you may want to have a secondary email account to protect your primary email account from any spam that could be generated. If the secondary account starts to fill up with spam you can get rid of it and open a different one.
- Use privacy settings on social networking sites. Social networking sites typically allow you to choose who has access to see your email address. Consider hiding your email account or changing the settings so that only a small group of people that you trust are able to see your address.
