Egham reigns as UK spam capital

Egham has been crowned the UK capital of spam according to new figures released today.

The sleepy Surrey town was found to receive the most spam per business user, with Alton and Petersfield in Hampshire following closely behind. Sutton Colfield in the West Midlands and Sutton in Greater London rounded out the top five.

But the absence of any major UK cities in the list was notable, with none appearing in top 25 towns that made up the statistics compiled by security provider MessageLabs. London was ranked 28th, Manchester 81st, Leeds 91st, Liverpool 99th, Newcastle 166th and Bristol 167th.

Matt Sergeant, MessageLabs senior anti-spam technologist, said: "It's a given that larger cities will receive a high total number of spam emails. However, by breaking statistics down to an average number per business user, the results are much more interesting. We can start to identify problem areas and analyse why businesses in different areas and industries are receiving more malicious emails than others."

According to the statistics, business users in Egham are each sent a whopping 189 spam emails on average per day, with users in Alton and Petersfield targeted by an average of 167 and 116 spam emails per day, respectively.

The geographical spread of places affected in the top ten [see below] is also striking, with the Midlands, North West, Yorkshire, Scotland all ranking - and even St Peter's Port in the Channel Islands, which came in tenth place.

Sergeant said the results suggested that larger organisations - which are more likely to base themselves in cities - typically had better policies in place when it comes to internet security. Businesses operating outside of major towns and cities are usually small and mid-size companies with less time and resources to devote to IT security.

"Smaller companies also often need to proactively push their contact details out into the public domain in order to secure business, whereas larger businesses can afford to rely more on reputation and referrals," he added. "Actively pushing out names and email addresses can provide cyber criminals with an easy hit list to target with spam emails."

The analysis listed Fareham and Farnborough in Hampshire, and Guildford in Surrey, as the three least targeted locations.

The MessageLabs top ten UK spam hotspots are:

1 Egham, Surrey

2 Alton, Hampshire

3 Petersfield, Hampshire

4 Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands

5 Sutton, Greater London

6 Macclesfield, Cheshire

7 Dundee, Scotland

8 Bradford, West Yorkshire

9 Colchester, Essex

10 St Peter's Port, Guernsey