Spam e-mails fall in most countries under privacy and electronic communications laws. Legislation states that organizations must only send marketing e-mails to individuals who have agreed to receive them, except where there is a clearly defined customer relationship.

 

 

How to deal with spam messages

If you receive unsolicited marketing by e-mail from an identifiable company which you believe falls outside of a ‘clearly defined customer relationship’, use an ‘unsubscribe’ link or e-mail the organization to ask them to stop (keeping a copy of any correspondence). Tell the sender about the problem and allow some time for them to put things right.

 

If the unsolicited marketing e-mails continue despite unsubscribing or asking the sender to cease, government agencies exist and can be contacted to investigate complaints. Much spam e-mail is spread internationally – there are overseas agreements between many countries to cooperate and exchange information to try and prevent using email spam filters.

 

In our busy day-to-day lives, a safe course of action is to mark the unwanted message as spam, ignore and delete it. When using the collaborative BullGuard Spamfilter, sharing your found spam information with the BullGuard server keeps the latest spam definitions up-to-date and improves the efficiency of BullGuard Spamfilter for all users.

 

 

Spam trends

 

In 2010, emerging economies showed the highest increase in spam delivery. Spam level has increased in countries like UK, France and Germany. In UK, numbers have almost doubled from 2009 to 2010 because of the continuous expansion of broadband internet.

 

Despite the increase in spam levels in the mentioned countries, for the first time in history global spam volumes have decreased significantly, due to the shutting down of many active spam servers.

 

Legend: Annual spam levels in billions

 

Russian authorities have reported their first criminal investigation against a person believed to have propagated almost 20% of all the world’s spam mails. When the servers in question were disabled, spam volumes dropped with almost 60 billion.

 

Service providers have made notable progress in disabling spam servers in countries like China and Turkey where spam levels dropped with up to 80% in 2010. The same happened in Brazil, after providers restricted access to port 25, which is used in e-mail relaying.