Saturday, March 8, 2003
NEW YORK (AP) -- In a single 24-hour period Monday and Tuesday, America Online says it trashed a billion e-mails offering mortgages and organ enhancement instead of letting them slip into customers' inboxes.
AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the company's software filters snagged the record number of junk, or "spam," messages.
AOL said its members used "report spam" buttons on their e-mail software 5.5 million times in the period. The largest portion of messages reported -- about 10 percent -- came from users of Microsoft's Hotmail e-mail service, Graham said.
AOL said it blocks an average of 28 junk e-mails per account, per day.
Graham said "an extremely small fraction" of the messages snagged in AOL's spam filters were legitimate ones. He declined to reveal any figures for that mail.