Spam Mail Fact Sheet

by Daniel L. Weiss

Unsolicited e-mail or spam, as it is commonly called, has grown exponentially in the past several years. While some people find it a mere nuisance, others are increasingly concerned about the dangerous messages being delivered to the inboxes of our nation’s youth. This fact sheet describes the growing threat of spam.

Volume

Approximately 30 billion email messages are sent worldwide every day.¹
Spam has grown from 8 percent of all email in 2001² to 58 percent in December, 2003.²
The average Internet user received 2,263 spam messages in 2002 (6.2 per day), up from 1,350 the year before.⁴
Jupiter Research estimates that 4.9 trillion spam messages were sent worldwide in 2003.⁵

E-mail users

Approximately 93 percent of adult American Internet users (117 million people) use some form of e-mail.⁶
Thirty-three percent of e-mail users have clicked on a link in unsolicited e-mail to get more information.⁷
Seven percent of e-mail users have ordered a product or service through unsolicited e-mail.⁸

Pornographic spam

Adult content comprised 18 percent of spam mail in December 2003.⁹
A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) study found that 17 percent of pornographic spam included pornographic imagery that loaded automatically when opened. Forty-one percent of these messages also included false “from” or “subject” lines with the purpose of leading more people to open the message and be unintentionally exposed to the images.¹⁰
More than 80 percent of children who use e-mail receive inappropriate spam every day. Of all children who use e-mail, 47 percent receive spam that links to x-rated Web sites on a daily basis. Twenty-one percent of children who receive spam mail open and read it.¹¹

Vile & Deceptive

The FTC found the following when it created 150 e-mail addresses and posted them around the web:

Thirty percent of postings on children’s newsgroups received spam for pornography and adult products and 10 percent for hallucinogenic drugs.

Forty-one percent of postings on seniors newsgroups received porn spam.

One e-mail address posted on the FTC web site—which was nearly invisible because of white letters on a white background—received 1,700 pieces of spam in six weeks.

E-mail was always spammed when posted in chat rooms and was spammed 86 percent of the time when posted on newsgroups.¹²

Another FTC study of 1,000 pieces of spam, drawn randomly from a pool over more than 11 million, found that:

18 percent of all spam mail was for adult product or services;¹³

33 percent of spam mail contained false information in the “from” line;¹⁴

22 percent of spam mail contained false information in the “subject” line;¹⁵

44 percent of spam mail contained false information in either the “from” or “subject” line;¹⁶

40 percent of spam mail contained false information in the text of the message;¹⁷

66 percent of spam mail contained false information somewhere in the message.¹⁸

Cost to business

AOL blocks 2.4 billion messages per day, which accounts for 80 percent of all incoming e-mail.¹⁹
Businesses spent approximately $200 million on anti-spam protection in 2003.²⁰
Lost productivity in U.S. organizations due to spam accounted for up to $10 billion in 2003.²¹

Public Opinion

Ninety-three percent of online Americans find spam mail somewhat or very annoying, up from 49 percent just three years ago.²²
Most people consider pornographic spam to be most annoying. In one poll, 86 percent of people said they were bothered by porn spam, the highest of all categories.²³
Fifty-two percent of e-mail users say that spam has made them less trusting of e-mail in general.²⁴
Twenty-five percent of e-mail users say that too much spam has led to a reduction in how much they use e-mail.²⁵

Spam solutions

Thirty-six states have enacted “anti-spam” legislation, most of which focuses on banning deceptive contact information.²⁶
In December 2003, President Bush signed the United States’ first federal anti-spam legislation. The law prohibits using false contact information, requires a workable opt-out provision, and directs the FTC to investigate the efficacy of establishing a national “do-not-e-mail” list, among other provisions.
Americans forward approximately 130,000 spam messages to the FTC’s Unsolicited Commercial Database everyday.²⁷

¹ Deborah Fellows, Spam: How it hurting e-mail and degrading life on the Internet, The Pew Internet & American Life Project, October 22, 2003, p. 6.
² John Swartz and Paul Davidson, “Spam thrives despite effort to screen it out,” USA Today, May 8, 2003, News, p. 1A.
³ Brightmail, Inc., “Spam Statistics,” < http://www.brightmail.com/spamstats.html > (15 January 2004).
⁴ Janet Zimmeran, “Unsolicited e-mail messages have reached record numbers. But don’t give up. There are ways to fight them,” The Press-Enterprise, 4 November 2002.
⁵ Chris Taylor, “Spam’s big bang,” Time, June 16, 2003, p. 51.
⁶ Fellows, Spam, p. 6.
⁷ Fellows, Spam, p. iii.
⁸ Fellows, Spam, p. iii.
⁹ Brightmail, Inc., “Spam Statistics,” 2003. < http://www.brightmail.com/spamstats.html > (15 January 2004).
¹⁰ False Claims Made in Spam, Federal Trade Commission, April 30, 2003, p. 13 < http://www.ftc.gov/reports/spam/030429spamreport.pdf >
¹¹ “Symantec survey reveals more than 80 percent of children using e-mail receive inappropriate spam daily,” Business Wire, June 9, 2003.
¹² Jennifer Beauprez, “Spammers thorough, persistent, study shows,” The Denver Post, 22 December 2002.
¹³ False Claims Made in Spam, p. 2.
¹⁴ False Claims Made in Spam, p. 3.
¹⁵ False Claims Made in Spam, p. 5.
¹⁶ False Claims Made in Spam, p. 7.
¹⁷ False Claims Made in Spam, p. 8.
¹⁸ False Claims Made in Spam, p. 10.
¹⁹ John Swartz and Paul Davidson, “Spam thrives despite effort to screen it out,” USA Today, May 8, 2003, News, p. 1A.
²⁰ Swartz and Davidson, “Spam thrives,” p. 1A.
²¹ Swartz and Davidson, “Spam thrives,” p. 1A.
²² “Majority in favor of making mass-spamming illegal rises to 80% of those online; about 40% of all emails received are now spam, according to The Harris Poll,” PR Newswire, 16 July 2003.
²³ “Majority in favor,” PR Newswire, 16 July 2003.
²⁴ Fellows, Spam, p. i.
²⁵ Fellows, Spam, p. i.
²⁶ David E. Sorkin, “Spam Laws: United States: State Laws: Summary,” SpamLaws.com., 2003, http://spamlaws.com/state/summary.html > (15 January 2004). ²⁷ False Claims Made in Spam, p. 13.

If you enjoy reading stories like this one, sign up for the free CitizenLink Daily Update e-mail. You'll get news and commentary from Focus on the Family Action delivered right to your computer.

Focus on the Family's Issue Analysis

Spam Mail Fact Sheet