The 2009 ENISA Anti-Spam Measures survey, which asked 92 email offering providers in Europe (5 from the UK) about the measures they take to combat junk messages in their networks, has revealed that less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes (i.e. most email is still junk). In addition it found that no significant progress had been reported in the fight against spam.

The good news is that most email providers not only take care of protecting their customers from receiving spam but they also avoid sending spam to others; 70% of respondents consider spam prevention to be an extremely significant or significant security activity. Sadly spammers continue to adapt and as a result the Internet remains chocked by junk and marketing messages that nobody wants.

However the survey found that SPAM does not have a huge impact on network bandwidth for most ISPs, though over a quarter of respondents noted spam accounting for more than 10% of helpdesk calls. Interestingly most providers consider it necessary to have effective anti-spam measures for the sake of attracting and retaining customers.


In general, nearly all providers provide some form of spam filtering to their customers. A very high percentage of respondents offer spam filtering on their networks (see below), and the vast majority of these offer it for free. Spam filtering software for customers to install is much less common, though most of the largest providers offer it.


Though anti-spam measures are proving generally effective, these efforts could still be improved. The survey recommends a number of improvements, such as notifying ISPs that originate spam that they are doing so and discussing countermeasures with them. Though we suspect that wouldn’t work with non-UK ISPs who still allow it for very deliberate and possibly criminal reasons.