Spam Outnumbers Legit Messages Almost 9 to 1Spam Outnumbers Legit Messages Almost 9 to 1

The percentage of e-mail dubbed spam climbed again last month, a message-security provider said Thursday.

According to Redwood City, Calif.-based Postini--which processes 2.4 billion messages each week for 4,000 corporate client--88 percent of November's mail was malicious, such as spam, phishing scams, viruses, or directory-harvest attacks. In October, the ratio was 86 percent junk, 14 percent legitimate.

"The increase of e-mail attacks this month [shows] spammers are getting smarter," said Andrew Lochart, Postini's director of product marketing, in a statement.

Directory-harvest attacks, in which spammers try to hijack a company's entire e-mail directory to send spam, increased even more dramatically during November. In the last four weeks, in fact, harvest attacks have climbed more than 25 percent.

On the virus front, Postini said that 1.3 percent of all messages it processed contained malicious code of some sort, with the Netsky, Bagle, and Sober families holding down the top three spots in November and accounting for 69 percent of all viruses spotted.