Interesting Facts

Facebook is seemingly planning to charge UK users to send instant messages to people outside their circle of friends. (The social networking giant says it is introducing the charges in an attempt to ‘prevent spam’ with users being charged for contacting celebrities or anyone who isn’t a friend or a friend of a friend. It's cheaper to send messages to less well-known figures, such as Robert Peston who costs 71p, to around £11.00 for celebrities, such as Tom Daley at £10.68. I wonder if the fee will be split with the celebrity?  It looks to me like Facebook is really trying to monetise spam.  If they wanted to prevent spam, they would simply block messages.)

According to ZDNet, 51 per cent of website traffic is through automated software programs, often with      malicious activity in mind. (The breakdown of an average site’s traffic is as follows: - 5% = hacking tools looking for an unpatched or new vulnerability within a site. - 5% = scrapers. - 2% = automated comment spammers. - 19% = “spies” collating competitive intelligence. - 20% = search engines (non-human traffic but benign). - 49% = real people who are actually browsing the Internet. Maybe I should cut my visitor logs in half.) Source

According to WebProWorld the USA is responsible for the most spamming. (Here's a list of the worst culprits:- Here's a list of the countries who were responsible for the most spam between January-March 2010. 1. USA 13.1% 2. India 7.3% 3. Brazil 6.8% 4. S Korea 4.8% 5. Vietnam 3.4% 6. Germany 3.2% 7. United Kingdom 3.1% 8. Russia 3.1% 9. Italy 3.1% 10. France 3.0% 11. Romania 2.5% 12. Poland 2.4% Others 47.3% Well to me it looks like The Others are the worst offenders.)

According to research by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee, email spam uses more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year. (This is enough to power more than 2.4m homes, and amounts to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2. Not just that, but searching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam uses 80% of the energy, so of the 131kg of CO2 created by the average business user 22% of it is related to spam. According to the same report spam filtering would reduce unwanted spam by 75%, the equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road. I've never heard of wanted spam.)

According to a report by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee 62 trillion spam emails are sent globally, every year. (I know I get more than my fair share. Maybe there should be an 11th commandment, Though shalt not Spam.)

According to University of Cambridge computer scientist; Dr Richard Clayton, e-mail addresses beginning with with "A", "M" or "S" get more spam than those starting with "Q" or "Z". (Spammers seemed to like the letters, "A", "M", "S", "R" and "P". About 40% of all the messages arriving in the e-mail inboxes of accounts with addresses that had one of those characters as their first letter were junk. Much less popular were "Q", "Z" and "Y". For these cases, spam was about 20% or less.)