News 

The company scanned nearly a billion emails for its clients during May and found nearly 700 million of these were classified as spam. It says it has been weeding out 258 spam mails and 35 viruses a second on average.

Mark Sunner, Chief Technology Officer at MessageLabs, said things only looked like they would get worse: 'Spam levels follow a constant upwards curve while viral threats remain steady for notable periods. Volumes [for viruses] spike during major outbreaks such as MyDoom or when virus wars break out between the authors.'

MessageLabs says that about 9.1 per cent email it scans is virus infected.

The statistics offer little hope that current anti-spam legislation, which has been in action for half a year now, is having any effect as a deterrent to combat the problem.