Oregon Public Broadcasting

Check your email and chances are that at least one message -- and probably more -- will be spam.  Turns out Oregon is third in the nation for the amount of unsolicited email we receive.  Pete Springer reports.

A recent study by MessageLabs, a web security company, puts Oregon just behind Illinois and South Dakota in terms of spam rates.

MessageLabs scans three billion email connections daily.  Their study found more than eighty-percent of email is spam.

This comes as no surprise to Craig Schiller.  He’s the chief information security officer for Portland State University.

Schiller says up to 90-percent of email received at PSU is spam.

Craig Schiller: “You know the overhead of having to process all that is huge.  The services that we have to purchase that filter and hunt for spam, that’s money that could have been spent on something else.  The storage space for all of that when it comes in -- even temporarily -- costs the university in terms of equipment.”

Schiller says other concerns over spam involve fraudulent offers, virus attachments, and spam that can hijack your email account without your being aware of it.