29% of Internet users have purchased goods from spam emails, according to Marshal. The most commonly purchased items include sexual enhancement pills, software, adult material and luxury items such as watches, jewellery and clothing. Botnets are networks comprised of thousands of infected personal computers, controlled remotely by criminals. They have enabled spammers to push down their costs through economies of scale and eliminated the need for spammers to host their own spam servers as they simply take control of other people’s computers instead. Recent FBI prosecutions of bot-herders and investigations of message-boards used by spammers, suggests the going rate for spammers to send a mln spam messages is as little as $5-10.

In Q2 2008, 74% of all mail received was spam. In Q2 2008, Turkey became the country with most zombie computers (11% of the global total), followed by Brazil (8.4%) and Russia (7.4%). The USA, which in the Q1 2008 accounted for 5% of all zombies, is now in ninth place with just 4.3% of the total. Google Adwords has been at the center of one of the most notable attacks over the last quarter, PandaLabs says. This Google service had been used previously to launch phishing attacks and the trend continues. This type of attack uses social engineering to trick users into revealing confidential details (bank account numbers, passwords, etc.).

87% of all teens engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication, which includes text messaging, sending email or instant messages, or posting comments on social networking sites, according to Pew Internet Project. Although participation in these activities is widespread, 60% of teens who send these communications do not consider them to be “writing.” 38% of teens think of these communications as writing, and an additional 2% don’t know whether they consider them to be writing or not.

According to Radicati, Microsoft Exchange will run about 210 mln corporate e-mail accounts in 2008, growing to 319 mln mailboxes in 2012.

About 20% of all US heads-of-household have never sent an e-mail, and about 20 mln households, or 18%, are without Internet access, according to Parks Associates. 21% never searched for information on the Internet.

According to a survey by Pew Internet & American Life Project, in February-March 2007 56% of respondents reported sending email every day. 50% of the respondents stated they first went online for “personal” reasons; 31% said work was the cause; 19% said school was the cause.

US banking industry holds in excess of $7.17 trillion in loans, including the billions of dollars in mortgage, credit card, auto loans and commercial loans. 36% of customer emails went unanswered by the banks. 96% of those audited did not offer live chat as a communication channel. 94% of banks did not offer a true dynamic, flexible knowledge base - the majority of banks offered little more than a list of static FAQs, Talisma reports.

By 2012, business use of Web-based mail will jump to 20%, says Gartner.

16% Americans have sent or received emails with friends and family regarding candidates and the campaign, and 14% have received email messages from political groups or organizations about the campaign, according to the Pew Internet Project.

By 2012, these companies will expend most of their advertising dollars on the internet, according to Direct Association Marketing Direct . Commercial email, for instance, is projected to grow by almost 25% each year from 2007 to 2012. Direct marketers in the health services industry overwhelming employ direct mail campaigns (89%). About 70% are multichannel campaigns.

30% of managers plan to use e-mail marketing and 32% - search marketing, according to Sapient. 38% said that search is the channel providing the greatest ROI to managers’ organizations. 28% of marketers thing that search will increase spending the most in the next 6 to 12 months

63% of connected online physicians participated in various pharma-sponsored marketing programs monthly including online detailing, versus 53% of unconnected online physicians, according to JupiterResearch. 66% of connected online physicians forwarded useful content to colleagues, while 58% recommended specific Web sites to patients.

51% of marketer said they cannot track campaigns across multiple channels including social networks, e-mail, search and mobile content in real-time, according to Sapient . 35% of them said they’re least confident about tracking in real-time. 42% of managers plan to use social networking analytics tools in the next year and a half, compared to 12% currently.

China’s most popular Internet application is online music, used by 86.6% of those surveyed, followed by instant messaging with 81%, according to China Internet Network Information Centre. E-mail placed only 5th, with 56.5% using it. 81% of Chinese users online have instant messengers installed.

eROI found that during the heaviest e-mail volume period, from 8 am to 5 pm, e-mail opening rates and CTR increased. Open rates start out at 21.4% at 8 am and rise to a high of 34.1% at 5 pm Click-through rates begin at 2.6% at 8 am and rise to a high of 6.4% at 4 pm, before falling to 5.2% at 5 pm.

Nearly 9 out of 10 email messages delivered to large enterprises in November 2007 were spam, according to Proofpoint. While overall spam levels dropped slightly (from 89% in October to 88% in November), large companies were still receiving an extremely high volume of spam, with an upsurge in attachment-based spam of almost every kind. Image-based spam made up nearly 10% of all unsolicited emails delivered to enterprises in November 2007, up 24% from the previous month. About 5% of all spam came in the form of Microsoft Word (.doc) attachments, a 65% increase over from October 2007.

MarketingVox quotes eROI report, saying that the best day for e-mail is Wednesday. The average open rate on Wednesdays was 25.4% with an average click-through rate of 3.9%. The second-best day to e-mail is Monday, with an average open rate of 24.7% and a 3.1% click-through. Saturday commanded the highest CTR of 5%, but the lowest open rate with 18.7%.

60% of all business correspondence still gets sent containing one or more grammar or spelling errors, according to WhiteSmoke. 32% of writers are failing to use all the words needed for a grammatically correct sentence. 28% of mistakes relate to punctuation, that is, knowing when to use a period, comma or question mark. Agreement between sentence elements comes up next in 8% of the data.

JupiterResearch projects that e-mail marketing spending will grow from $1.2 bln in 2007 to $2.1 bln in 2012. Spending on retention e-mail will more than double during that period and account for over half of total e-mail marketing spending in 2012.

Phishing attacks in the United States soared in 2007 as $3.2 bln was lost to these attacks, according to Gartner. 3.6 mln adults lost money in phishing attacks in the 12 months ending in August 2007, as compared with the 2.3 mln who did so the year before. Of consumers who received phishing e-mails in 2007, 3.3% say they lost money because of the attack, compared with 2.3% who lost money in 2006, and 2.9% who did so in 2005. The average dollar loss per incident declined to $886 from $1,244 lost on average in 2006 (with a median loss of $200 in 2007), but because there were more victims, $3.2 bln was lost to phishing in 2007, according to surveyed consumers. Some 1.6 mln adults recovered about 64% of their losses in 2007, up from the 54% that 1.5 mln adults recovered in 2006.

E-mail advertising spending will grow from $338 mln in 2006 to $616 mln in 2011, a six-year increase of 82%, Research and Markets says.

10% of US employees say their company has used email to fire or lay off employees. And 17% indicated their boss used emails to avoid other difficult face-to-face conversations. 5% of respondents had been the recipient of a humiliating email that was copied to other individuals. 23% of workers have received a politically incorrect email, 15% have been the recipients of an email sent in anger, and 13% reported receiving flirtatious emails, Harris Interactive reports. 19% said they had sent an email to the wrong person, and 38% had sent an email without an intended attachment.

Mass-market mobile email users in the US are predicted to reach 38 mln by 2008, a significant increase from the 12.1 mln reported in 2005, MPathix says.

39% of e-mail marketers said list turnover is their biggest challenge in a survey conducted by JupiterResearch. 24% of respondents said they plan to implement a viral marketing campaign, only 10% said such actions were very successful. 15%% of survey respondents plan to begin appending email addresses to their customer lists, but only 4% of those who had tried this tactic rated it successful.

IDC predicts that nearly 97 bln emails, over 40 bln of which will be spam messages, will be sent daily worldwide in 2007. This is the first year that spam email volumes are expected to exceed person-to-person email volumes sent worldwide. IDC estimates that the size of business email volumes sent annually worldwide in 2007 will approach 5 exabytes, nearly doubling the amount over the past two years.