It is always interesting to explore the email spam trends across a large period of time, so this time we’ll compare spam rates within the last 12 months, from October 2011 to October 2012. Here comes the good news: the last month stats revealed an unprecedented drop in the email spam rate.
According to Symantec.Cloud data, the global spam rate dropped by more than 10%, from 75% of email traffic in September, down to 64.8% in October 2012. Please see the chart below to track the email spam trends from October 2011 to October 2012. As you can see, the last month’s spam rate is very similar to the “dead months” in 2011, March and April, when the percentage of spam messages went down to 64.52%.
Reasons for the Sudden Drop of the Email Spam Rate in October 2012
As suggested by the editors of the latest Symantec Intelligence Report, one of the reasons for the sudden decline in email spam rates in October 2012 could be the disappearance of the Festi botnet which has apparently been hosted in Saudi Arabia in recent months.
By the way, if we take a closer look at the list of countries reported to be the sources of spam in October 2012, we are sure to notice that Saudi Arabia is no longer in the top ten list:
- India – 11.9%
- Brazil – 7.9%
- United States – 6.6%
- Canada – 5%
- Russian Federation 4.6%
- Vietnam – 4.1%
- Peru – 4%
- South Korea – 3.3%
- Romania – 3%
- Turkey – 2.9%
Unfortunately, drops like this one have been noticed before, but other botnets soon replaced the discontinued one, or a “dead” botnet was reincarnated. We’ll see how it goes within the following months,and we can truly hope that the decline will become a steady trend.
Global Spam Categories in October 2012
As we can see from the chart below, the Sex/Dating topic continued to be a leader in October 2012 and accounted for 62.73% of all spam messages. Jobs, Pharma and Watches stayed in the top 4 categories as well and only shifted places between each other: the Jobs topic was especially “popular” last month and accounted for 10.45% of all spam messages.
Although email spam rates have recently shown a sudden decline, these rates cannot be compared to the small figures like 8% or 9% typical to the years 2001-2002. You can actually read our blog post on Email Spam Trends across 2001-2012 and feel nostalgic about the olden times…
So email spam is still a big problem both for companies and individuals. That means you still need a good time-proven solution to have a clean and organized Inbox. A good way to go is with EmailTray – an extremely smart email client that sorts all incoming emails and groups them under the Top Priority, Low Priority, No Priority and Spam tabs. EmailTray comes as a Windows email client and an Android email app, both of which are available for free. Get yours now and enjoy a more spam-free mailing experience.