Spam On Course to Be Over Half of All Email This Summer

Brightmail® Puts Forward Top Strategies to Stop Spam at UK Spam Summit

San Francisco, CA – July 1, 2003 – Brightmail, the world's leading anti-spam software company, has projected at least 1 in 2 of all emails that individuals and businesses receive will be spam by September 2003 or earlier, and a fifth of spam in the UK will be pornographic. Enrique Salem, Brightmail's CEO, made this forecast and suggested practical steps to stop spam when he joined other anti-spam experts giving evidence at the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group's (APIG) Spam Summit in Westminster, on 1st July 2003.

Brightmail sees and stops more spam than any other anti-spam company, filtering over 60 billion emails a month for spam on behalf of its Internet service provider and corporate business customers. In the last five years, Brightmail has recorded the incidence of spam attacks climbing from a few hundred a month to nearly 7.5 million in May 2003. Each of these single unique attacks can affect millions and millions of mailboxes anywhere on the Internet.

The volume of spam is rocketing. In April 2001, 7 percent of the email Brightmail checked was spam. As of June 2003, over 48 percent of all email traffic on the Internet is now spam. In its evidence to the APIG, Brightmail now forecasts that over 50 percent of email will be categorized as spam before the summer is over. Brightmail is already finding that some email users, such as high profile companies, are suffering from spam rates as high as 79 percent.

Spam email in the UK is rapidly becoming more offensive. In June 2003, over 20 percent of spam was pornographic. This is now the second largest UK spam category, following 34 percent of email spam that offers products for sale. In the U.S., 19% of spam fell into the Adult-content category in June.

Enrique Salem, CEO, Brightmail said: "Spam email volumes are growing exponentially, so our forecast of spam breaking the 50% barrier of total Internet email traffic this summer is a conservative one. While the volume of adult spam is disturbing, the largest category of unsolicited spam continues to come from illegitimate direct mail companies that offer products to email users who have not requested to be contacted.

"Fortunately, the outlook for email users is very positive. As the UK Spam Summit and similar events in the U.S. demonstrate, politicians and legislators are acknowledging the growing problem of unsolicited email spam attacks, and are looking for appropriate combinations of solutions to fight it," stated Salem.

Spam can be broadly defined as unsolicited bulk email sent over the Internet. Brightmail believes that the most effective solution for spam prevention is a combination of legislation, anti-spam technology, cooperation of legitimate direct email firms using best practices, the support of large Internet service providers, and allowing the individual user to decide what email they want blocked.

In the "Top Strategies to Stop Spam" recommendation that Enrique Salem presented to the APIG Spam Summit, he proposed the following:

1. Deployment of available technology solutions by ISPs and corporate enterprises to counteract unsolicited email marketing requires:
• multiple spam protection techniques
• the ability to identify legitimate direct email senders
• the ability to identify bulk email across the Internet

2. Prevent bulk direct mailers from sending unsolicited email by establishing tougher judicial and financial penalties against spammers. Global regulations should allow proactive detection of illicit spammers, making it more costly and risky for spammers to operate. The Internet industry and law enforcement agencies need to be empowered to make spammers accountable for their actions.

3. Global enterprises and ISPs need to provide email users with ongoing education to help protect them from spam attacks.

4. Develop guidelines that establish email best practices for legitimate email direct marketers to follow. For the protection of both email users and direct marketers, it will become important to be able to identify legitimate direct marketers. There will also need to be significant improvement in how direct marketers manage their mailing lists—as the Advertising Standards Association has done in the UK.

5. Finally, there needs to be a process established to enable the continual re-evaluation of policy and legislation to address the emergence of new forms of unsolicited bulk email marketing spam attacks.