China's spam bill soars to $760m

China's spam bill soars to $760m


Every surfer receives an average 20 spam emails a week

Junk mail is costing China at least $760m a year in lost productivity, according to estimates from the Internet Society of China (ISC).

Chinese surfers receive about 20 spam emails a week on average, and waste about 13 minutes checking and deleting the messages, the ISC announced at an anti-spam conference held in Beijing this week The comments were reported by the People's Daily.

The figures do not cover other potential problems caused by spam, such as losses due to misinformation or fraud.

The ISC also reported that it was receiving close to 30,000 complaints a month about spam, of which 78 per cent related to dubious advertising and 11 per cent to pornography.

A further six per cent of complaints were 'unclassified' because they were in languages other than Chinese - mainly English and Japanese.

China is generally ranked among the world's top two spam generating nations, with about one fifth of all spam being relayed through or generated by computers in the country.