MessageLabs names UK spam capital

Anti-spam outfit MessageLabs has compiled a – somewhat useless and yet nevertheless compelling – list of the top ten most spammed locations in the UK.

First spotted by ITWire, the survey – based upon the interesting metric of number of spams received per individual business user – shows our beloved capital city of London hitting just 28th on the charts, beaten by some places so out-of-the-way as to make you question the sample size of MessageLabs' survey.

For the terminally curious, the top ten most spammed locations in the UK are:

10: St. Peter's Port, Guernsey
9: Colchester, Essex
8: Bradford, West Yorkshire
7: Dundee, Scotland
6: Macclesfield, Cheshire
5: Sutton, Greater London
4: Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands
3: Petersfield, Hampshire
2: Alton, Hampshire
1: Egham, Surrey

The 'winner' of the study, Egham, apparently plays host to business users enjoying receipt of a fairly impressive 189 messages every day. To put that in perspective, the safest place for a spam-harried business user to hide was Fareham, which only gets an average of two spam messages per week per user. I was pretty surprised to see my own base of operations – Bradford – listed in the top ten, although having looked at the amount of crud my spam defences filter out perhaps it's not that shocking after all.

Matt Sergeant, anti-spam technologist – no, really – at MessageLabs explains the strange lack of really big cities in the top ten by pointing out that "businesses operating outside of major towns and cities are usually small and mid size companies with less time and resources to devote to IT security," meaning that they're more likely to disclose e-mail addresses on a whim and less likely to use anti-spam and anti-virus measures.

Do you live or work in any of the top ten spam hotspots? Do your experiences bear out MessageLabs' results? Share your thoughts over in the forums.

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MessageLabs names UK spam capital

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