90% of email sent in June was spam

Spam-tastic monthly stats

2 July 2007 11:12 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

SoftScan announced today that spam levels are back up in the nineties, with 90.06% of email scanned during June classified as spam.

Spam levels fluctuated throughout the month and some days saw levels drop to 86%, but SoftScan concludes that the most likely scenario is that there were just less customers in the spam shop on these days.

"Changes in spam levels normally signal one of two things, either a change in tactics or more likely in this case, a drop in customers buying spam lists", comments Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan.

"Unfortunately I don't believe that this signifies a change for the better since the overall trend is so high. Like any other business, apparently spam shops also suffer poor trading days".

June also saw SoftScan record its highest ever percentage of email classified as spam when it stopped 96.55% of all email scanned, correctly identifying it as junk mail.

Narrowly beating February's record of 96.22%, the high level occurred during a weekend when there is less legitimate business email. Spam levels on week days during June peaked at 91.36%.

With no major outbreaks recently and a drop in phishing activity, the overall percentage of emails stopped as viruses fell in June to just 0.61%.

The top five virus families in June 07 were:

1. phishing: 96.56%

2. netsky: 0.91%

3. stration: 0.45%

4. bagle: 0.45%

5. mytob: 0.44%