Press Releases

January 28, 2005

Clearswift reports that over 43 percent of email spam sent in December of last year was to promote health care-related products or related services.

The Clearswift Spam Index finds that following health care, spam about direct products and fianance claimed the next two biggest percentages of spam volume last month, at just under 24% and just over 15%, respectively.

Clearswift bases its estimates on millions of e-mail messages it harvests with seed accounts every week.

For the first time ever in December, the company took a closer look at the health care category and was able to break it down even further. It found that just under 35% of all health care-related spam promoted libido-enhancing pills, 5% were for sexual organ enhancers and 2.6% were for weight loss offers.

Based on Clearswift's data from May, the volume of health care spam has declined over the past six month, which is due in part to new forms of spam becoming increasingly prevalent, like phishing.

Phishing scams didn't even appear on Clearswift's radar in May, but claimed 2.17% of total spam in December.

Most importantly, in May direct product spam accounted for only 4.6% of total volume. CLearswift explains that as items like the iPod sold out over the holiday season, the amount of spam puporting to offer these products also rose.

A recent report from Return Path noted that the volume of promotional e-mails rose considerably in the US over the 2004 holiday season (which includes most of December — through Christmas day).

Though Return Path found that most consumers (60.1%) deleted the extra e-mails they found in their inboxes, a notable 28.3% said the larger volume of e-mail had no effect on their regular e-mail habits.

Source: eMarketer