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Fully, 67.6 per cent of email traffic in April was spam, according to the company, which scanned 840 million emails in the month.

Spam sent to the US, UK, Germany, Australia and Hong Kong accounted for 97 per cent of all spam sent over the month. The US was worse hit with 83 per cent of traffic identified as spam. The UK drew the second slot with 52 per cent.

Mark Sunner, Chief Technology Officer at MessageLabs, said: 'The US presents the widest market for spammers in terms of Internet access and adoption of email as a communications tool. While it currently has the worst global figure at 83 per cent, it's only a matter of time until the UK falls victim to similar volumes in around six-months time, whilst Asia-Pacific countries will likely see the same impact in 12 months time. When it comes to the Internet, when

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the US sneezes, the rest of us catch a cold.

'These latest figures show spam is becoming a bigger problem worldwide, and unfortunately shows that current legislation is having little impact in curbing the upward trend.'

While finding so much spam, MessageLabs is also weeding it out. The effectiveness and rapid adoption of filtering systems such as this and those of other companies mean that spammers necessarily have to increase the volumes they send out in order to reap the same rewards.

And spamming is still a lucrative industry. Brightmail recently analysed the activities of two spammers that ran a two month campaign for penis enlargements in the US. They earned roughly $200,000 for finding their client 8,000 new customers.

And as for legislation, the recently inaugurated Can-Spam Act in the US has been effectively used by a spammer against an antispam company. Earlier this month self-confessed spam king Scott Richter won a temporary restraining order against anti-spam outfit SpamCop to bar it from including it in its blacklists of known spammers used by other companies to block unwanted mail. He claimed that by holding the identity of complainants against his company confidential, SpamCop made it impossible to address their concerns and so comply with the Can-Spam legislation.

The problem can only get worse before it gets better.