The study was based on an analysis of more than one billion daily email messages sent to its more than 50,000 customers worldwide. The figures look definitely bad, especially when compared to statistics from previous years: the spam level was around 85 to 90% of email in 2006 and around 70% in 2004, when the federal CAN-SPAM Act went into effect. Spam accounted for only 5% of all email in 2001.

The ever growing level of spam (as well as the increased level of complexity) have forced researchers to continually monitor the situation:

“The spam war is a continuous battle between spammers and security vendors,” said Dean Drako, president and CEO of Barracuda Networks. “Security vendors now require 24-by-7 defense operations to continuously monitor the Internet for new spam trends and distribute new defensive solutions immediately. This combination can block a new spam attack within minutes of its start – virtually at zero hour.”

In a separate poll, researchers found the 50% of users received five or fewer spam emails in their inbox each day, while 65% received less than 10 spam messages each day. 13% of the respondents has the “honor” were flooded with a minimum of 50 spam emails on a daily basis.