Get ready for a steady diet of spam. Unwanted e-mail will exceed legitimate e-mail by July 2003, reports message-filtering service MessageLabs, Minneapolis. Spam already accounts for 40 percent of e-mail, per anti-spam software maker Brightmail, San Francisco. By 2007, U.S. consumers will get an average 3,600 spam messages a year (up from 2,200 now), per Jupiter Research. Financial messages account for 32 percent of spam, followed by products (29%), adult (15%), health and scams (each 5%), spiritual (4%), and leisure and Internet (each 2%).
New York City-based Jupiter predicts that e-mail marketing will grow to $8.3 billion in 2007 from an estimated $1.4 billion in 2002. The trick for marketers, of course, will be rising above all that spam.
