Postini, the spam-catching and security-monitoring company, has released its report on the health of email for September 2006.

The company claims that spam now accounts for four out of every five emails that passed through the company’s scanners, an increase of 1.6% over August.

It also reports that,

at any given time, 50,000 unique computers on the Internet that were simultaneously exhibiting malicious behavior such as attempting to propagate spam, viruses, phishing and other attacks against email communications.

Virus-laden emails made up 0.44% of all emails that the company scanned.

Either I am particularly blessed or these reports are a bit of a beat-up.

Even when you read them cautiously (it only measures the email that Postini sees — c. 9 billion emails, and the company has a vested interest in talking the problem up), it seems so out of whack with the amount of spam than passes through my accounts.

I reckon that only 30-40% of my emails are spam. Perhaps my email service catches the rest, perhaps Australians are not desirable targets, perhaps things are worse in the corporate email world, perhaps personal experience is not the most statistically sound starting point.

Of course, that’s 30-40% too much but it’s not prophet of doom material.email, spam, phishing, viruses, internet, the end is nigh

Bounced emails cost their senders USD 5 billion a year, according to a report from the gateway security company IronPort .

The company studied global email traffic and concluded that only 20% of emails are legitimate. Spam makes up 67% of email and bounced emails account for 9%. Viruses infect 3% of email messages worldwide and phishing attacks are less than 1 percent.

Direct Marketing site DMNews reports that “Patrick Peterson, IronPort’s chief technology officer, said he was “shocked” when he first heard about the cost of bounced messages.”email, spam, bounced messages, viruses, phishing