Porn spam is dead

The amount of spam featuring pornography has fallen dramatically as spammers turn to more profitable products to flog and email less likely to meet with resistance from filters.

According to statistics from mail-filtering company Clearswift, the percentage of all spam flogging porn has dropped to just five - financial spam picked up the slack with a 27 per cent rise since June 2003.

The other hot property in spammers' must-sell list is dodgy digital TV descramblers, which supposedly give users the chance to get a look at channels they're normally barred from and are, obviously, illegal.

The change in emphasis from porn to financial spam could be down to several reasons, according to Alyn Hockey, Clearswift's director of research.

One is potentially the tendency for email applications like Outlook to block images and people setting their filters particularly to block words that pertain to porn. The fewer emails that get through to users, the fewer sales they make.

That's precisely why spammers are ditching the porn, said Hockey. "You have to remember these are businesspeople and if one avenue of opportunity is cut off, they will look for another... Spammers are quite switched on in terms of what products they market," he told silicon.com.

Switched on they are. Clearswift's Spam Index noted a rise in healthcare junk email – think weight loss and anti-anxiety tablets - just after Christmas and toys such as remote-controlled helicopters just before the Christmas shopping was due to start.