Spam now more than half of all received email

The latest statistics from spam filtering companies have confirmed their customers' inboxes are getting more spam than legitimate email, increasing concerns over the ongoing usability of the medium.

The statistic is a genuine concern to SpamTrap chief executive Andrew Kent, despite the likelihood that it will lead to a boost in business for his company.

"We've just closed off May and done the sums. [We have calculated] 55.8 percent of all customers' email was spam," he said.

According to Kent, the cross-over happened in April.

"April for us was just over 50 per cent. It was a transition month," he said. MessageLabs, another mail filtering company, has released similar statistics, showing 55.1 per cent of all messages scanned in May were spam.

The scourge of spam is a genuine threat to the usefulness of email when "you start looking at some other numbers", Kent says.

The fact that the ratio of spam is higher among SpamTrap users than the general population is because the customers usually sign up because they're being spammed stupid, Kent says.

Patrick Gray writes for ZDNet Australia.