How many spam emails are sent per day? 2026.

Gmail alone blocks nearly 15 billion unwanted emails every day, according to Google's own October 2023 announcement. That works out to about 174,000 spam, phishing and malware messages stopped every second, by one provider. Across all providers, 44.99% of the world's email was spam in 2025, according to Kaspersky's annual spam and phishing report, which means roughly four spam messages travel for every five legitimate ones.

So how many spam emails are sent per day in total? Nobody counts that directly. Every published figure is one vendor's telemetry, or one vendor's spam share multiplied by someone's forecast of total email, and the answers people quote swing by tens of billions depending on whose numbers they multiply. A single "160 billion a day" headline hides more than it tells.

This page shows the range instead: what each primary source measured, how, and in which year. It covers volume, the share of email that's spam, where spam comes from, what it carries and what it costs. Every number links to its original publisher. Cite freely with a link.

Spam email statistics at a glance

How many spam emails are sent per day?

No organisation publishes a verified worldwide count of spam emails sent per day; the largest single-provider figure is Gmail's nearly 15 billion unwanted emails blocked daily (Google, 2023). Everything else is either a provider's own volume or a share that has to be multiplied by an estimate of total email.

The daily totals you'll find elsewhere, often between 100 and 200 billion, come from multiplying a spam share like Kaspersky's 44.99% by a forecast of all email sent worldwide. The forecast most of them use comes from Radicati Group, whose site was unreachable when we checked in November 2026, so we don't reprint a total we couldn't verify at the source. The honest answer: well over 15 billion a day, since that's one mailbox provider's blocked mail alone, and probably a large multiple of that.

We'd treat any single "spam emails per day" number as an order of magnitude, not a measurement. Each vendor counts what reaches its own filters, and a blocked message, a rejected connection and a delivered newsletter someone marked as spam are three different things. The 15 billion figure is the one we trust most, because it's a floor from the company that runs the world's biggest inbox.

The share of email that counts as spam is where sources diverge most, which the next section lays out.

What percentage of emails are spam?

Kaspersky measured 44.99% of global email traffic as spam in 2025, the most widely cited share, while business-focused filters report lower figures: Hornetsecurity counted 36.9% of business email as unwanted.

The spread between 5.6% and 44.99% isn't a contradiction. Kaspersky counts all spam across its telemetry; Hornetsecurity counts unwanted mail that reached business gateways; Cloudflare counts only the malicious subset. Each answers a different question about the same flood.

We think the 0.3% Gmail ceiling is the most underrated number on this page. It shows the gap between what spammers send (close to half of all mail) and what a legitimate sender may get flagged for (under one in 300). Real senders get punished for a rate spammers would consider a rounding error.

Spam also isn't spread evenly across the year, which matters if you're reading any single month's figure.

Spam peaks in the fourth quarter

Kaspersky's 2025 data shows spam share rising from about 43.50% for most of the year to 49.26% in the fourth quarter, with November the busiest month at 52.87%.

November's 52.87% is 9.37 points above the rest-of-year average, so more than half of all mail in the shopping season is junk. A sample taken in November will overstate the annual rate; one taken in summer will understate it. That seasonal swing also shapes where spam is sent from.

Where does spam come from?

Russia sent 32.50% of the world's spam in 2025, followed by China at 19.10% and the United States at 10.57%, according to Kaspersky's analysis of outgoing spam by country.

Country of origin describes where the sending machine sits, not where the spammer lives. Much spam leaves through hijacked computers and rented servers in botnets, which is why Spamhaus's botnet counts move with spam volume.

From our side of the problem, the source country matters less than the address list. A botnet can send from anywhere, but it can only send to addresses it has. Every address published in plain text on a web page is an entry in someone's list, which is the whole reason a tool like Email Protector exists: it hides the address from scrapers while people still see and click it.

What those messages carry is a bigger worry than where they're sent from.

What do spam emails carry?

Spam increasingly carries links rather than files: Proofpoint found URLs used four times more often than attachments in malicious email in 2025, and Cloudflare found deceptive links in 52% of malicious messages.

The shift from attachments to links matters for filters. A file can be scanned once on arrival; a link can point to a clean page at delivery and a credential form an hour later.

Our reading: most spam is still noise, but the noise is the delivery system for the expensive stuff. Hornetsecurity's 2.3% malicious share sounds small until you remember it was 427.8 million messages. A filter that's right 99.9% of the time still lets through a lot when the volume is measured in billions.

Those messages that get through show up in fraud statistics, which the next section covers.

How much do spam and phishing cost?

US victims reported $20.9 billion in internet crime losses in 2025, and business email compromise (BEC) alone accounted for $3.05 billion, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

The phishing numbers moved in opposite directions: complaints fell 1% while reported losses tripled. The average reported loss per phishing complaint went from $362 to $1,127. BEC is a different scale again, at $123,005 per complaint, about 109 times the phishing average.

We read the IC3 numbers as a story about targeting. Bulk spam gets fewer victims each year because filters and users have learned, but the attacks that do land are aimed better and ask for more. BEC is spam's expensive cousin: low volume, one well-researched email, a five- or six-figure wire.

Which raises the question of how well the defences hold up.

How well do spam filters work?

Gmail stops more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware before it reaches the inbox, according to Google, and authentication rules have cut unauthenticated mail to Gmail users by 75%.

Filters are very good at the bulk problem and weaker at the targeted one. Gmail's 99.9% describes mass mail; Verizon's 16% describes the few messages crafted well enough to get a person to act.

We build anti-spam tools, and the lesson we keep relearning is that filtering is the last line, not the first. The cheapest spam to stop is the spam that never gets your address. That's why we'd rather hide an address on a page, or put a bot check on a form, than count on a filter to catch every message afterwards.

The same logic applies to the other door spam uses: contact forms.

Does spam also come through website contact forms?

Contact forms are a second entry point for spam, but no public body publishes aggregate contact-form spam numbers; the email statistics above cover messages sent to addresses, not form submissions.

Scripts that crawl pages for addresses can find and fill forms too, and form spam lands in the same inbox through your own website. We're collecting our own data on this, because the numbers people quote are vendor anecdotes. Our contact form spam statistics page tracks what's measurable so far, and the share of internet traffic that comes from bots explains where the senders come from.

For a small site, the practical answer is two steps: don't publish a scrapable address, and don't run a form that a script can fill in a second. If you only do the first, our free email obfuscator takes about a minute.

The original figures in this page come from simple arithmetic on the sources above, shown next.

How we calculated the original numbers

Four numbers on this page are computed here from verified inputs. Each uses one source only, so no figures from different vendors are mixed.

1. About 174,000 unwanted emails blocked per second by Gmail. Google's figure of nearly 15 billion a day (October 2023) divided by 86,400 seconds: 15,000,000,000 ÷ 86,400 = 173,611. Because Google says "nearly", treat this as an upper bound for 2023.
2. 0.82 spam emails for every legitimate one. Kaspersky's 2025 spam share of 44.99% leaves 55.01% legitimate: 44.99 ÷ 55.01 = 0.818, or about four spam messages for every five legitimate ones. This holds for Kaspersky's telemetry, not for every inbox.
3. BEC costs 109 times more per complaint than phishing. From FBI IC3 2025: BEC $3,046,598,558 ÷ 24,768 complaints = $123,005; phishing and spoofing $215,843,126 ÷ 191,561 = $1,127; $123,005 ÷ $1,127 = 109.
4. Average phishing loss per complaint tripled. From FBI IC3: 2024 losses $70,013,036 ÷ 193,407 complaints = $362; 2025 = $1,127; $1,127 ÷ $362 = 3.1.

IC3 figures are complaints reported by victims, so all of them undercount real losses. The ratios hold as long as reporting rates are similar across crime types, which IC3 doesn't claim.

What the 2026 numbers say

Spam volume is flat to slightly down; the danger isn't. Kaspersky's spam share fell 2.28 points in 2025, yet malicious attachments rose by 19 million, malware email by 131% (Hornetsecurity) and phishing losses tripled (FBI IC3). Less junk, sharper hooks.

"How many spam emails per day" has no single answer. Gmail's 15 billion is a verified floor for one provider. Totals of 100 billion and more are products of a vendor share and a traffic forecast, and should be cited as estimates with both sources named.

Prevention beats filtering for small sites. Filters stop 99.9% of bulk mail, but a filter only sees what arrives. Keeping an address off scraper lists and keeping bots off forms reduces what arrives in the first place. For the platform side of that, see our WordPress security statistics, and the full set lives on the statistics hub.

FAQ

How many spam emails are sent per day?

Gmail alone blocks nearly 15 billion unwanted emails a day, according to Google (October 2023), so the worldwide total is well above that. No organisation publishes a verified global count. Figures of 100 billion and more come from multiplying a spam share, such as Kaspersky's 44.99%, by a forecast of total email traffic.

What percentage of emails are spam?

44.99% of global email traffic was spam in 2025, according to Kaspersky's annual report, down from 47.27% in 2024. Business-focused filters see less: Hornetsecurity counted 36.9% of business email as unwanted. Cloudflare counted 5.6% as outright malicious.

Which country sends the most spam?

Russia sent 32.50% of the world's spam in 2025, according to Kaspersky, followed by China at 19.10% and the United States at 10.57%. Country of origin reflects where the sending machines sit, which often means hijacked computers in botnets.

How effective are spam filters?

Gmail stops more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware before the inbox, according to Google (2023). Targeted mail still gets through: Verizon's 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found phishing was the entry point in 16% of breaches.

How much money do phishing emails cost victims?

US victims reported $215.8 million in phishing and spoofing losses in 2025, according to the FBI's IC3, up from $70.0 million in 2024. Business email compromise cost $3.05 billion, about $123,005 per complaint, roughly 109 times the phishing average.

When is spam at its highest?

Spam peaks in November and December, according to Kaspersky: 52.87% of all email was spam in November 2025 and 51.80% in December, against about 43.50% for the rest of the year.

Sources

1. Kaspersky (Securelist), Spam and phishing in 2025 (February 2026)
2. Kaspersky, Kaspersky reports 15% growth in malicious email attacks in 2025 (February 2026)
3. Google, New Gmail protections for a safer, less spammy inbox (October 2023)
4. Google, Email sender guidelines (accessed November 2026)
5. Microsoft, Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025 (October 2025)
6. Cloudflare, Radar 2025 Year in Review (December 2025)
7. Hornetsecurity, Cyber Security Report 2025 press release (December 2024)
8. Hornetsecurity, Cybersecurity Report 2026 press release (November 2025)
9. Proofpoint, The Human Factor 2025 Vol. 2 (August 2025)
10. Mimecast, 2025 Global Threat Intelligence Report press release (October 2025)
11. Spamhaus, Botnet Threat Update July to December 2025 (January 2026)
12. APWG, Phishing Activity Trends Report Q2 2026 (August 2026)
13. FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Internet Crime Report (April 2026)
14. FTC, New FTC data show a big jump in reported losses to fraud to $12.5 billion in 2024 (March 2025)
15. FTC, New FTC data show people have lost billions to social media scams (April 2026)
16. Verizon, 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, Executive Summary (2026)

Methodology. Numbers were collected in November 2026 and checked against the original publisher's page, report or press release, not against other statistics roundups. Vendor figures describe each vendor's own traffic, so shares from different vendors are shown side by side and never combined. We excluded figures we could not open at the source, including the Radicati Group email volume forecast (site unreachable in November 2026) and Statista charts that don't name an original source. Google's 15 billion figure dates from October 2023 and is marked as dated. Last updated 14 November 2026.