Irish Workers 'Receive 95 Spam Emails A Day'

Irish business email users are sent an average of 95 spam emails every day, a new study has revealed.

Clean Communications, an Irish anti spam development company, conducted a study on 1,000 Irish companies' emails during October 2008.

The study found that Irish business email users were sent an average of 95 spam emails every day.

However, at one company, researchers found that 4,030 emails per person were sent every day, totalling 120,916 spam emails per employee every month.

The study was based on information taken from The Email Laundry anti spam service.

Ralph Casey, Technical Director of Clean Communications said: "Spam is consistently representing 95% of email traffic to Irish business users this year. Most companies have suffered some sort of loss of productivity from their problem by the time they start to use our service.

"We also see from our system that quite a lot of the spam is coming from other Irish IP addresses. Currently 6.6% of the spam has last come from an Irish machine."

Clean Communications said that the increase in spam volumes seems to move in direct correlation with the increase in broadband connections. As more people are connected to broadband at home, their computers become infected with viruses that, unbeknown to themselves, send out spam. As broadband connections are continuing to rise worldwide so should the volumes of spam being sent. So, there is little hope of spam disappearing in the short term.

However, the company said that it was continuing to develop new methods of fighting the spammers. Their 'Advanced Connection Filtering' software detects when email is coming from one of these home viruses and doesn't accept the email. So, although the amount of spam being sent to you may be increasing, you no longer have to know anything about it.

(KMcA)