Alton crowned Britain’s spam capital

Alton in Hampshire is the most spammed town in the UK, according to research.

Symantec MessageLabs Intelligence revealed that Alton business users were sent 397 spam emails a day, meaning that the town took the spam capital crown' from Egham, which was last year's most badly affected.

Teddington was close behind with users getting 373 spam emails per day, while Havant was awarded third place, receiving 232 pieces of junk mail every day.

Interestingly, spammers were ignoring the town of Fareham, as it was the town least spammed in Britain for the second year running.

The big cities were quite far down in the ranking, with London down in 44th position and Manchester down in 64th, with users only' receiving an average of 101 and 88 spam emails respectively.

This suggested that criminals were targeting locations with higher densities of small to medium sized businesses (SMBs), and focusing less on areas that were home to some of the biggest companies, which could have better spam controls.

"Eight of the most spammed towns and cities are new to this years' top ten listing and all have a high percentage of SMBs," said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst at Symantec, in a statement.

"[It is] suggesting spammers are targeting those businesses who potentially are less likely to have spam filters in place," he added.