The amount of spam email and registrations in spam-heavy domains decreased since the introduction of the recent changes to the data protection laws across the EU.

The new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in May, brought about concerns that this would lead to an increase in spam because security researchers would no longer be able to track down new domain registrations and identify potentially bad ones.

However, research by Cisco Talos, “shows a clear drop-off in email between pre- to post-GDPR overall”.

According to Cisco’s report, on 1 May 2018, the total volume of email was 433.9 billion messages – of this, spam accounted for 370.04 billion messages, or 85.28 % of all email. On 1 August 2018, the total volume of messages was 361.83 billion, 85.14 %, or 308.05 billion messages, identified as spam.

The figures were welcomed by EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova in a tweet.

“Spammers are not — at least at this time — rushing to launch new campaigns because of GDPR-enforced WHOIS privacy rules. Spam is still a big problem, but it has not become a bigger problem, contrary to popular opinions among security researchers,” the study said.

Average daily new domain registrations have fallen slightly since May with an average of 223,500 new domain registrations each day. From May to July, the average number of new domain registrations was 213,300 — a slight drop off of 10,000 new domain registrations per day.