Business Impact

More than 97 percent of e-mail messages sent over the Internet are spam. All this unwanted email not only taxes the in-boxes of recipients and the resources of email providers, but it also creates the ideal environment for malware attacks and phishing attempts. Blocking spam and phishing is a top priority for email providers, social networks, and other online communities.

Spam Facts

• Advertisements for pharmaceutical products accounted for 48.6 percent of the spam messages blocked by Microsoft Forefront Online Security for Exchange content filters in the second half of 2008, with advertisements for sexual performance products, such as Viagra and Cialis, accounting for 10 percent of the overall total.
• Together with non-pharmacy product ads (23.6 percent of the total), product advertisements accounted for 72.2 percent of spam during this same period.
• In an effort to evade content filters, spammers often send messages consisting only of one or more images, with no text in the body of the message. Image-only spam messages accounted for 7.3 percent of the total in the second half of 2008.
• Mirroring the economic downturn experienced by much of the world in 2008, stock-related spam all but disappeared from our content filters in late 2008, dropping to 0.6 percent of the total from 9.6 percent in the first half of the year.
• Non-stock-related financial spam, a newly tracked category in the second half of 2008 (encompassing subjects such as debt consolidation and mortgage refinancing), accounted for 3.8 percent of the total.