Spam Statistics 2026: Volume, Sources, and Costs

Spam made up 47.27% of global email traffic in 2024, according to Kaspersky's filter telemetry — roughly 169–171 billion of the 376.4 billion emails estimated to move worldwide each day. Most of it originates from a short list of countries, and the criminal end is expensive: Americans reported $12.5 billion lost to fraud in 2024 to the FTC and $20.877 billion in internet-crime losses in 2025 to the FBI. Every number on this page links to the source we pulled it from.

Spam is unsolicited bulk email: messages sent at scale to people who never asked for them. This page is the sourced reference for the four questions people actually ask — how much of email is spam, how many spam messages go out per day, where they come from, and what they cost. Where the measurement vendors disagree, we show the disagreement instead of averaging it away.

What percentage of email traffic is spam?

Kaspersky, which publishes the most detailed public spam telemetry, put spam at 47.27% of all emails sent worldwide in 2024. Broader industry estimates land slightly lower, at around 45% of daily volume.

Here is the caveat most statistics pages skip: nobody measures "all email." Each vendor measures the mail crossing its own filter network, and networks differ. A consumer-heavy security vendor sees different traffic than a corporate gateway. Treat "spam share" as a mid-40s-percent consensus with vendor-sized error bars, not a constant of nature.

Measurement	Figure	Period	Source
Spam share of global email traffic	47.27%	2024	Kaspersky Securelist
Spam share of daily email volume	~45%	2025	SQ Magazine (Statista-based)
Unwanted emails blocked by Gmail daily	~15 billion	2023 announcement	Google

The Gmail number is worth sitting with. Google says its defenses stop more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware before it reaches an inbox, blocking nearly 15 billion unwanted emails every day. The spam you actually see is the sliver that survives one of the best-funded filters on earth.

How many spam emails are sent per day?

Industry estimates put total email volume at 376.4 billion messages sent and received per day in 2025, projected to reach about 392.5 billion by 2027. Apply the mid-40s spam share and you get the figure most often quoted: roughly 169–171 billion spam emails per day.

Two hedges worth keeping. First, these are modeled estimates built on Statista-family data — there is no global mail meter, and as of July 2026 no counted figure exists. Second, "spam" in these estimates spans everything from criminal phishing to legal-but-unwanted marketing. Those are different problems with different fixes, which matters later on this page.

Where does spam come from?

Kaspersky's 2024 data traces the sending infrastructure to a short list of countries:

Country	Share of world spam, 2024	Source
Russia	36.18%	Kaspersky Securelist
China	17.11%	Kaspersky Securelist
United States	8.40%	Kaspersky Securelist
Kazakhstan	3.82%	Kaspersky Securelist
Japan	2.93%	Kaspersky Securelist

One reading note: this measures where the sending machines sit, not where the operators live. A large share of spam is relayed through compromised servers and botnet-infected consumer devices, so a country's rank says more about its infected-machine population than its criminals. Spamhaus maintains live reputation rankings by country and network if you want today's leaderboard rather than an annual snapshot.

What does spam cost?

The two most rigorous public datasets are American, and they measure different things. The FTC's Consumer Sentinel counts consumer fraud reports across every contact method. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) counts internet-crime complaints, including business losses.

Dataset	Latest figure	What it counts	Source
FTC Consumer Sentinel	$12.5 billion lost (2024)	Consumer fraud reports, all channels	FTC press release
FBI IC3	$20.877 billion lost (2025)	Internet-crime complaints, incl. business	2025 IC3 Annual Report

The FTC figure — more than $12.5 billion reported lost to fraud in 2024, a 25% jump over 2023 — came from 2.6 million fraud reports, with 38% of reporters saying they lost money. Investment scams led at $5.7 billion, followed by imposter scams at $2.95 billion. The detail that belongs on a spam page: email was the most-reported contact method for scammers, ahead of phone calls and text messages.

The FBI's numbers are steeper and still climbing:

Year	Losses reported to IC3	Source
2021	$6.9 billion	2025 IC3 Annual Report
2022	$10.3 billion	2025 IC3 Annual Report
2023	$12.5 billion	2025 IC3 Annual Report
2024	$16.6 billion	2025 IC3 Annual Report
2025	$20.877 billion	2025 IC3 Annual Report

In 2025 the IC3 logged 1,008,597 complaints — losses up 26% year over year, with an average loss of $20,699 per complaint. Reported losses have tripled since 2021.

The crime-type breakdown explains how spam converts into that money. Phishing and spoofing was the most-reported crime type at 191,561 complaints, yet accounted for only about $215.8 million in direct losses. Meanwhile business email compromise produced $3.05 billion in losses from just 24,768 complaints, and investment fraud $8.65 billion. Phishing is the cheap front door; the expensive crimes walk in through it. The heaviest burden falls on older victims: people 60 and over filed 201,266 complaints and reported $7.7 billion in losses.

What do phishing email statistics show?

The APWG observed 1,003,924 phishing attacks in the first quarter of 2025 — the largest quarterly count since late 2023. Attacks on online payment and financial sectors made up 30.9% of the total, and wire-transfer BEC attacks grew 33% quarter over quarter. On the defensive side, Kaspersky alone blocked 893,216,170 attempts to follow phishing links and 125,521,794 malicious email attachments across 2024.

For balance: email is no longer the only door. Verizon's 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report finds that 31% of breaches now start with software vulnerabilities, overtaking stolen passwords as the top entry point, and 48% of breaches involve ransomware. But for consumer-scale fraud, the FTC's contact-method data above still points one way: the pitch arrives by email more often than by any other channel.

Is spam getting better or worse?

Both, depending on which axis you watch. Losses are getting worse — the IC3 curve above tripled in five years. Volume is high and roughly stable as a share of traffic.

The infrastructure, though, is quietly improving. In early 2024 Google began enforcing bulk-sender rules: senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail addresses must authenticate their mail, stay under an enforced spam-rate threshold Google called an industry first, and offer one-click unsubscribe honored within two days. Google credits its earlier authentication requirements with a 75% drop in unauthenticated messages. We unpacked how that one-click mechanism works in one-click unsubscribe, explained.

What can you do about the spam you already get?

Split the problem the way the statistics do. Criminal spam — phishing, malware, fake invoices — is your filter's job; report it, block it, never click it. Gray mail — legal bulk mail you technically once agreed to — is the part of your inbox noise you can actually shrink, sender by sender, using the List-Unsubscribe header standardized in RFC 8058, the same mechanism behind Gmail's native unsubscribe button. Our step-by-step guide is at how to stop spam emails, and the data on whether unsubscribing actually works lives in email unsubscribe statistics.

One disclosure, since we build List-Unsubscribe parsing for a living at Flick (flicked.email): senders vary in whether they honor an exit, and our unsubscribe checker inspects whether a message exposes a standards-based one-click path.

FAQ

What percentage of emails are spam?

Spam accounted for 47.27% of global email traffic in 2024, per Kaspersky, with broader estimates clustering around 45%. The exact figure depends on whose filter network does the counting. Mid-40s percent is the defensible range.

How many spam emails are sent every day?

Roughly 169–171 billion spam emails go out per day, against an estimated 376.4 billion total daily emails in 2025. Gmail alone reports blocking nearly 15 billion unwanted emails daily. These are modeled estimates, not counts.

Which country sends the most spam?

Russia originated 36.18% of world spam in 2024, ahead of China at 17.11% and the United States at 8.40%, per Kaspersky. This tracks where sending machines sit — often hijacked servers and infected devices — not where the operators live.

How much money is lost to email scams?

Reported US losses reached $12.5 billion for fraud in 2024 (FTC) and $20.877 billion for internet crime in 2025 (FBI IC3). Email was the most-reported way scammers made first contact. The true total is higher — these datasets only count people who file a report.

Why am I suddenly getting more spam?

Usually because your address entered new lists: a data breach, a broker sale, or a sender sharing it onward. Filters still catch the criminal bulk of it, so a sudden increase mostly means more gray mail — senders you can leave one at a time. Address the senders, not just the messages, and the volume drops for good.