Unsubscribing is a pain. It takes several clicks, and doesn’t always work. Unfortunately, with the amount of spam everyone gets on a daily basis it’s become a necessary part of our lives.  What’s worse, some not-so-nice senders will realize you’re a real person and that you actually check your email – and they will put you on more spammy mailing lists. It happens way more often than you think!

Some scary spam statistics…

• Spam accounts for 14.5 billion emails a day world wide
• This is 45% of all emails
• 90% of spam is in English, 96% a year ago, so I guess this means spam is getting more “international”
• The US is by far the largest generator of spam email at 15%
• India comes in second at around 7%
• Advertising related spam accounts for 36% of all spam emails
• Adult related subject matters come in at second at 31%
• Only 2.5% of spam emails fall under the scam & fraud category
• A research group found that spam costs businesses $20.5 billion annually
• Nucleus Research estimates approximately $1934 is lost per employee because of spam

You may be asking yourself what’s one to do? Well, there are several options. The first is to simply be very careful about handing out your email address, which means limiting the news letters and promotions you sign up for, and the services and membership sites you join. Limiting your email’s exposure is the first step in reducing the amount of spam you receive.

You can also create a free email account from Gmail or Hotmail, and use that address when signing up for something.  If that address gets on some spammers lists, you can just open up another one, and change your subscriptions that you want to keep.

Editors note: If you sign up for the ICS News Bytes newsletter, we will never use that email address for anything else, and we will never sell or lend those addresses to another company.  And unsubscribing is quick and easy.