Infosec Spammers get more response from smutty emails than any other form of junk email.

While penis pill offers and pharmacy drugs continue to bring in a small percentage of punters, as many as one in 20 recipients visit porno websites after receiving lewd come-ons by email. Response rates for pharmacy drugs (0.02 per cent) and "Rolex watch offers (0.0075 per cent) are miniscule by comparison, according to a study by email filtering firm CipherTrust. The sales to click-through ratio for pharmacy drugs is one to 150.

The CipherTrust statistics refer to the percentage of end users who actually click through and buy products from spam received.

Given junk mail messages are sent in the hundreds of millions per day, it's easy to see why spamming continues to attract the unscrupulous.

The firm notes that as well as representing a nuisance to many email users, spam messages also pose a security risk as a means to trick users into visiting maliciously constructed websites. ®

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