Before year's end, all E-mail messages will be spam. At least that's the way things appear to be headed, according to a report released Tuesday by MessageLabs, an international provider of managed E-mail services.

The company's E-mail Security Intelligence Report, covering January through June and based on a sample of some 5 billion messages, says 86.3% of E-mail in the month of June was spam. During the first four months of the year, the figure ranged from 53% to 67%. Compare that to the first six months of 2002, when the company identified a scant 1.5% of E-mail as spam.

"We thought it couldn't go much higher when it was at 50%," says Brian Czarny, VP of marketing at MessageLabs.

By Thomas Claburn at InformationWeek.

[ Read more ]

Related items

• Review: Malware: Fighting Malicious Code (26 July 2004)
• Review: Viruses Revealed (28 April 2003)