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MessageLabs names UK spam capital
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 26th September 2008
Strangely, the Egham Tourist Board has yet to reference its coronation as the UK's spam capital.
First spotted by ITWire, the survey – based upon the interesting metric of number of spams received per individual business user – shows our beloved capital city of London hitting just 28th on the charts, beaten by some places so out-of-the-way as to make you question the sample size of MessageLabs' survey.
For the terminally curious, the top ten most spammed locations in the UK are:
10: St. Peter's Port, Guernsey
9: Colchester, Essex
8: Bradford, West Yorkshire
7: Dundee, Scotland
6: Macclesfield, Cheshire
5: Sutton, Greater London
4: Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands
3: Petersfield, Hampshire
2: Alton, Hampshire
1: Egham, Surrey
The 'winner' of the study, Egham, apparently plays host to business users enjoying receipt of a fairly impressive 189 messages every day. To put that in perspective, the safest place for a spam-harried business user to hide was Fareham, which only gets an average of two spam messages per week per user. I was pretty surprised to see my own base of operations – Bradford – listed in the top ten, although having looked at the amount of crud my spam defences filter out perhaps it's not that shocking after all.
Matt Sergeant, anti-spam technologist – no, really – at MessageLabs explains the strange lack of really big cities in the top ten by pointing out that “businesses operating outside of major towns and cities are usually small and mid size companies with less time and resources to devote to IT security,” meaning that they're more likely to disclose e-mail addresses on a whim and less likely to use anti-spam and anti-virus measures.
Do you live or work in any of the top ten spam hotspots? Do your experiences bear out MessageLabs' results? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Thankfully, catching the 99.9% of the spam is one of the few things our (outsourced - aaaaarrrrgh!) IT department do right.
Quote: âbusinesses operating outside of major towns and cities are usually small and mid size companies with less time and resources to devote to IT security,â
- I disagree entirely, in Macclesfield the two biggest employers are amongst the bigger global chemical companies!
I guess this could also be caused by machines infested by spyware kicking out tonnes of spam mail?
It looks like a completely pointless study though - presumably, they've surveyed these businesses, and assigned the "spam rating" based on the main business office address, so what about businesses with a lot of off-site workers etc.?
Personally, I'd rather see a list of spam *sources* - then I'd know where to aim the ICBM... (or whether it's time to rebuild my PC and clear up any trojans that got in!)