Two thirds of emails now spam: official | The Register

A study from rival message filtering firm Clearswift out yesterday suggests financial spam (37.8 per cent) is close to overtaking pharmaceutical spam (40 per cent) as the most common form of junk email. Healthcare spam dropped from 57 per cent of unsolicited mail in March back to 40 per cent in April, with financial spam growing from 26 per cent in March to 38 per cent of total spam blocked by Clearswift in April. It is the second straight month financial spam has grown. Financial spam accounted for 11 per cent of junk mail blocked by Clearswift in February.

Meanwhile porn spam continues to decrease, reaching its lowest level since the inception of the Clearswift Spam index in June 2003. A year ago, porno spam accounted for 22 per cent of all junk email blocked by Clearswift. Sexually explicit spam has been on decline ever since, accounting for only five per cent of total spam seen by Clearswift last month. US Federal Trade Commission rules insisting that porno spam needed to be labelled as "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT" came into effect last week.