A study of emails carried out between 1st and 30th June 2013 and covering 200,000 mail accounts generating 8.5 mn. emails a day has revealed that over 80% of email traffic is spam and only 9% is legitimate traffic, according to today’s Le Monde Informatique.
The study’s authors – email security specialists Vade Retro – have revealed that 81.38% of the world’s email traffic is in fact unsolicited and unwanted spam. Of the remainder, 9.40% is advertising, 9.18% are legitimate messages and 0.04% of emails harbour viruses.
The study reveals its subjects made 1.6 million unsubscribe requests with a compliance rate of 97.7%. Half the time cancelling a subscription involves sending an email to a generic address.