88% of Philippine emails are spam

Now, that’s another record to our credit. In the whole of Asia, 70% of all total emails are spam and the Philippines has the worst figure of 88%. That’s almost 9 out of 10 emails are spam.

The average percentage of emails sent from the Asia-Pacific region that were spam was 69 percent, the report added.

Although the Philippines had the highest proportion of spam, China was the largest source of spam by sheer volume, the report said.

Thirty-seven percent of all spam detected from Asia-Pacific originated from China.

Symantec said in a statement that it could not provide the total number of e-mails monitored but that the results was based on data from over two million “decoy accounts” attracting email from 20 different countries.

Where are these spam emails coming from? You’d think there’s some sweatshop out there in remote cities blasting away millions and millions of spam for their clients abroad?

{source: ABS CBN News}

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

15 Comments

Danny says:

15 years ago

Our company email receives a lot of local spam. Mostly selling crappy services like seminars and corporate retreats.
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mr. traffic says:

15 years ago

Great post and will pass this on to my clients.
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Miguel says:

18 years ago

But then again…

Most people nowadays use free email for their personal mail.

For example, I’m on Gmail and the only time I send mail using SMTP is when I’m at the office. When I do send mail, it’s mostly to colleagues in the office using the same email server.

Therefore, a large percentage of SMTP mail is spam, not because there’s a lot of spam but because people don’t use SMTP anymore.
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Gwapito.com says:

18 years ago

I dont believe that we are hub of spammers here. I believe the real spammers located in first and second world countries just used our country as launching pad for their spam scums.
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Wauks says:

18 years ago

With all the online e-mail marketing companies coming up, it’s not really surprising. But still… 88% @_@
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dennisagulo says:

18 years ago

@ManuelV – the report says emails originating FROM Philippines not COMING IN.

I have doubts on this report.

Can conclude two things:

1. That Many web servers based in the Philippines are not secure – unknowingly used as zombies to launch spam campaigns like phishing, porn, pharma emails etc..
2. That this report is incorrect. If I’m a Filipino spammer and launch a spam campaign
I will never use a server that is based in the Philippines.

Here’s a similar report in yahoo news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070323/tc_afp/philippinesasiaitinternet_070323*****0
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seav says:

18 years ago

Migs, unfortunately, that figure is probably correct. Read this recent piece on the O’Reilly Radar blog “Another War We’re Not Winning: Us vs Spam” (http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/another_war_wer.html)
They say that their servers are rejecting almost 95% of incoming SMTP connections! That Radar post is also quite informative since it gives opinions about e-mail spam from industry pundits (like Eric Allman, co-author of the SMTP RFC).
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Miguel says:

18 years ago

That figure sounds ridiculous to me. But then again, we have our own story…

Dear Sir,
I am Dr. Loi Estrada, wife of the jailed former president… and I need your help getting his fortune…
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naksd says:

18 years ago

I think its coming from all the zombie machines at PC rental shops, the types of people that use friendster, goes to so-called “Code” website then click on Ads that contain Malware and it gets installed and the owner does not care and your email and possibly your password will be stolen because of the Malware.
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ManuelV says:

18 years ago

Hi Yuga… that’s spam traffic regardless of country of origin? Or those numbers are based on email coming from the Philippines?
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Abe Olandres says:

18 years ago

Our sales email account at plogHost only gets about 3 legits out of 100. That’s 97% spam traffic.
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ManuelV says:

18 years ago

I wonder if real people with Philippine-based emails send emails to those decoy addresses. Perhaps all those decoys attracted were mostly bots, which explains the high 88%.

From my experience, 17% of emails coming from the Philippines and sent to my “displayed on web sites” email addresses are spam. (That’s 3 out of 18 emails.)
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KidBlogger says:

18 years ago

that’s so bad….. good thing there are many spam filters. :)
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