British Resident Receiving 6 Million Spam Every Year

According to ClearMyMail, provider of anti-spam service, British mechanic Colin Wells receives a massive 1,338,363 spam mails per month indicating that he gets 16,060,365 junk e-mails in a year. Wells started to get 50 spam mails per day after he began availing services of the "Orange" ISP in 1999.

According to Wells, the junk e-mails come from dubious companies. He said that he loses precious two hours every day only to segregate the spam messages from the couple of relevant e-mails that he expects. Thus, according to him, about 97% of his mailbox comprised of junk e-mails, as reported by sify on July 7, 2008.

Wells also said that so far, he got whopping 31 Million e-mails during the past 9 years and they have been growing ever since, touching a peak of 44,000 e-mails per day. However, only when he installed a spam filter on his PC in 2007, he understood that there were 6 Million spam mails coming to him during a certain twelve-month period. Since then, the volume of spam coming into his inbox started doubling in every two months.

Meanwhile, the ClearMyMail survey indicated that among the five highly-spammed individuals in Britain, Colin Wells has received the highest number of spam. The second person to receive the maximum spam also uses Orange, getting 13,578 e-mails per day. And the third, fourth and fifth most spammed persons receive12,428, 5,760 and 3,982 spam mails per day respectively.

And, while it is difficult to find a connection between an individual's choice of ISP and the volume of spam he receives, the discovery that Orange users get 80% of the total spam, as per ClearMyMail, looks slightly fishy.

According to Managing Director Dan Field of ClearMyMail, Wells became an easy target of the spam senders because he committed an error of clicking on unsubscribe URL links in the spam messages. That was an indication that his e-mail ID was active, permitting the spammers to not only continue sending him their spam but also to pass on his particulars to other spam mailers, further escalating the total spam coming to him, as reported by theregister on July 7, 2008.

Related article: British Telecommunications Introduces New Anti-Spam System

» SPAMfighter News - 7/21/2008