How many emails do you get each day?
Pause for a moment and try to estimate the average number of emails that come into your own inbox on a daily basis. Is it 10? 50? More than 100?
The average office worker may receive about 90 emails or more each day.
Globally, billions of emails are sent and received each day.
Spam accounts for 14.5 billion of these messages. That’s about 45% of all emails. (Some research companies estimate that spam email makes up an even greater portion of global emails, up to 73% in fact)
What proportion of these emails do I actually want to read?
So, you can spend a lot of time checking through your emails, when half of them could be a complete waste of time.
However, that’s a mere annoyance.
Beyond these, are the proportion of emails that are actually malicious. The emails you don’t want. These could contain viruses, ransomware or other damaging nasties. Or they could be phishing emails, intended to get personal information (bank details, passwords etc) out of you.
The images below show emails for a typical small business in the UK in 2020:
How many emails are actually dangerous?
Emails that were totally rejected by this spam filter (i.e. were definitely spam or malicious in some way) made up between 12% and 77% of all incoming mail, with an average of 64% over the year to date!
94% of all malware is delivered by email. This is because it works. So this is the area to defend the most vigorously.
Guard your inbox!
This is the first line of defence – make sure that you have a good spam filter in place. If you don’t get in touch – info@datamills.co.uk, 0114 287 0510 or have a look at our website.
Once you’ve got the first line defence in place, the next thing is to make sure that you, and all your staff, know what to beware of in the emails that do get through, so that you don’t click on a dodgy link.
You might like to consider staff training. Again, get in touch if you’d like pointers towards great resources for this.