Illinois Most Spammed State

Chicago (IL) - A new study by anti-spam provider MessageLabs shows that Illinois is the most spammed state (by ratio) in the USA. If you’re surprised, so are we, because we expected this dubious honor to belong to either New York or California as the most populous areas of the nation. Interestingly enough, the other states in the top ten are also surprises.

Matt Sergeant, Senior Anti-Spam Technologist at MessageLabs says, "The varying spam levels across states can be attributed to different socioeconomic factors and levels of security awareness in each state."

MessageLabs says it compiled the statistics after scanning three billion emails a day in June 2008. The calculated the ratio levels of spam by comparing the number of spam emails versus the number of valid emails received by web surfers. Globally people have an 81.5% spam rate while the United States sits at 86%.

Illinois led the nation with a 92.1% spam rate while South Dakota and Oregon followed close behind with 90.9% and 89.1% rates respectively. New Hampshire, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Indiana, Texas, Pennsylvania and Alabama rounded out the top ten, in that order.

Sergeant said spammers are "relentless in their tactics for exploiting computer users" and are turning towards hosted services like Microsoft’s Skydive and Google Docs to evade spam filters

The folks in Illinois must really like their Viagra.