Spam messages are primarily sent by spammers for the purpose of advertising. They can be junk mail or pop-ups that you don’t invite. It can be vexing to see your email accounts flooded with numerous spam messages that you need to delete on daily basis. What’s more, some spam may contain harmful contents like spyware or malware like virus. Spam has also been looked as intrusion to our privacy that becomes more important to broadband users nowadays.

Sophos, a research firm released a report on countries that are sources of spam and also released a list of countries that relay spam worldwide. According to the latest report, the UK which was in the nineth position in the last report fell to 50th position, which is indeed good news. Other countries which saw decline in relaying spam include Japan (from 32 to 136), Canada (from 26 to 89) and Australia (from 33 to 85).

When population is taken as standard, the USA is placed in 64th position and tops the table followed by Russia and China. All these three nations contributed more than one-third of spam relayed during the fourth quarter of 2007. However, when spam emitted per capita is taken as standard, The Pitcairn Islands is in first place followed by countries like Niue, Tokelau, Anguilla, the Faroe Islands etc.

Carole Theriault of Sophos says:

"Between October-December 2007, the US relayed far more spam than any other country due to the sheer number of computers in the country that had been taken over by remote hackers,"

"But when measuring spam emitted per capita, the results are very different. Most of the countries in this chart have very small populations compared to the usual offenders, but their totals are sky high when it comes to spam emitted on a per-person basis. Just because your PC is located on a remote island in the South Pacific doesn't mean it's not contributing to the global spam problem. All computer users, wherever they are in the world, need to wake up to the threats and ensure their PCs are properly protected."