FrontBridge business e-mail statistics show spam has reached a 2004 peak.

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FrontBridge Technologies Inc, a provider of enterprise message management and e-mail security, has released its latest statistics on business e-mail.

The results show that enterprise spam volume has reached a 2004 peak,

as global spam volumes have reached 85%. The report also shows that spammers and virus writers have teamed up, as more than 190m spam messages from January to June 2004 carried a virus payload. In most of these cases, viruses were specifically designed to transform infected machines into so-called "spam zombies", systems unknowingly used to relay spam.

The data was reportedly compiled by a specialised spam analyst team and consisted of data collected on the FrontBridge global message management network over a six-month period. The company's team filters and analyses characteristics for more than 100m messages from more than 2,000 enterprise customers every day.

The latest analysis, which is based on more than 8bn e-mail messages, has shown how the increase in spam is not only clogging enterprise messaging, but also causing additional employee disruption, which results in higher costs.

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