Statistics and Estimates
The total volume of email spam has been consistently growing, but in 2011 the trend seems to have reversed. The amount of spam users see in their mailboxes is only a portion of total spam sent, since spammers' lists often contain a large percentage of invalid addresses and many spam filters simply delete or reject "obvious spam."
The first known spam email, advertising a DEC product presentation, was sent in 1978 by Gary Thuerk to 600 addresses, which was all the users of ARPANET at the time, though software limitations meant only slightly more than half of the intended recipients actually received it. As of August 2010, the amount of spam was estimated to be around 200 billion spam messages sent per day. More than 97% of all emails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report. MAAWG estimates that 85% of incoming mail is "abusive email", as of the second half of 2007. The sample size for the MAAWG's study was over 100 million mailboxes.
A 2010 survey of US and European email users showed that 46% of the respondents had opened spam messages, although only 11% had clicked on a link.
Read more about this topic: Email Spam
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