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The most annoying spam of 2002
Los Angeles - Every
person on the net has one thing in common. They all hate spam.
Anyone who has an e-mail account will
have received these unsolicited commercial messages that offer you
things you do not want, at prices you will not pay, from companies you
will never call.
2002 was a bumper year for these
messages and now 30% of all mail flying around the net is thought to
be spam.
Filtering firm Surf Control has
compiled a list of the top 10 most annoying spam messages sent across
the net in the last 12 months.
Message overload
Unsurprisingly, top of the list were
messages with a sexual theme.
Spam top 10
- Free adult site passwords
- Low price drugs (Viagra)
- Refinance your mortgage
- Nigerian confidential money
transfer
- Tiny remote control car
- Best online casino
- #1 Pasta pot
- Get out of credit card debt
- Meet singles in your area
- Copy DVDs in one click
The most annoying spam purported to
pass on to people free passwords for sex sites that usually levy a
charge to look beyond the front page.
Next on the list was a pharmaceutical
service offering people the sex drug Viagra.
Also on the list of most annoying
spam messages were those asking people to help get money out of
various African nations.
These 419 scams as they are called
are entirely bogus but regularly catch out gullible net users who let
their greed overwhelm their common sense.
Surf Control estimates that spam
costs businesses around the world about $9billion a year to deal with.
This estimate includes the time it
takes people to delete the messages, the cost of buying larger mail
servers and storage systems to cope with in-boxes flooded with the
messages and the cost of having staff unclog networks overloaded by
spam.
There is little sign of an end to
unsolicited mail.
Last year, one in 12 e-mails passing
through MessageLabs' filter system was identified as spam.
The e-mail filtering company has
warned of a dramatic rise in the amount of spam clogging in-boxes
It says the amount of spam will
exceed normal e-mails by around July. -- BBC News
Brudirect.com
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