Spam being rapidly outpaced by 'spim'

While the torrent of unsolicited spam emails continues to rise, it is being far outpaced by the surge in unwanted messages sent to the users of instant messaging programs, analysts have warned.

The volume of so-called "spim" is set triple in 2004, according to a new report from the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm in Palo Alto, California.

The company projects that 1.2 billion spims will be sent, 70 per cent of which are porn-related. This is a mere trickle compared to the 35 billion spams expected, but the researchers warn that spim is growing at about three times the rate of spam, as spammers adapt their toolkit to exploit a rapidly rising number of new instant messaging (IM) users.

"The reason spim has taken off is very simple - the money and the marketers go where people are," says Robert Mahowald, an analyst at the IT advisory firm IDC in Massachusetts. "IM is just another channel, but now people are starting to use it more often."

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