Spam, spam, glorious spam!

UK email users have seen a dramatic rise in the amount of spam clogging their in-boxes during 2002, according to new figures released by email security company MessageLabs.

One in every eight email messages in the UK currently contains spam, according to MessageLabs' estimates -- up from one in every 199 just last January. Judging by US trends, there is likely to be worse ahead: across the pond, one in three emails is an unsolicited bulk advertisement.

"Six to nine months ago, spam was seen as a minor annoyance or an inconvenience, but nowadays people are beginning to see that it is a serious productivity problem," said," said MessageLabs chief technical officer Mark Sunner.

He said that spammers methods for avoiding filtering tools have also been growing increasingly sophisticated, including polymorphic spams that change slightly to avoid static filters. "There's definitely an arms race between those sending spam and the filtering organisations," he said.

View: Spam levels skyrocket in UK