Email spam and phishing are serious obstacles on the road to efficient work flow and email productivity. Spam messages clutter your Inbox, distract your attention and absorb your work time while you revise and delete them. Spam emails may contain malware or links to malicious websites, thus putting your computer at risk. Moreover, a large amount of daily spam can make you feel stressed and totally exhausted.

Spam can be deemed less harmful if compared to the fall-outs of phishing. Phishing emails may jeopardize your virtual identity and your financial estate – if you don’t use anti-phishing tools, forget about security and don’t follow the advice on how to avoid scams.

Can you imagine that about 68% of all emails that people receive daily are nothing else than spam? That is a big statistic, especially if you take into account the time that you normally spend on managing your Inbox and sorting emails. The good news is that the spam rate has been decreasing over the last 3 years, and hopefully it will keep on decreasing along with the shutdowns of spam-spreading botnets. The other good news is that you can use intelligent email software to prevent spam and manage your Inbox effectively. Try out the EmailTray email client for Windows or the EmailTray app for Android and see the difference in email productivity before and after using these email programs.

According to a Symantec Intelligence Report issued in February 2012, one of the most spam-affected countries was China. As of February 2012, nearly 74% of all mail received by Chinese users was spam. The Netherlands and the US crowned the list as well by showing the rates of 70% and 68.9% of spam of all incoming mail respectively.

The most popular spam categories are dating, pharmaceutical, jewelry and weight loss; adult-related messages are found in nearly 43% of all spam.

Email phishing is harder to do yet the fall-outs are much more dramatic. Unfortunately one of 298 emails that we receive daily is phishing. Each phishing attack puts your identity at risk and compromises the brand being phished, since the phishing victims constantly lose trust in the brands and service providers which have suffered from the phishing.

See the infographic below to get a bigger picture of spam and phishing trends in 2011 – the beginning of 2012. Click to view the full-size image:

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