Spam now represents nearly 93 percent of all email – the highest level ever recorded by Postini – further driving the need for businesses to keep their email secure and productive. This unprecedented wave of spam is expected to be accompanied in the new year by expanded compliance initiatives across all forms of electronic communication, strict regulations requiring messages to be secured and major new threats posed by Web 2.0 and globalization.

In November, Postini stopped a record 22 billion spam messages before they reached the 36,000 businesses using its services worldwide, preventing the wasted consumption of an unprecedented 86.5 terabytes of network and processing capacity. Postini now blocks approximately 12 spam messages for every valid Internet email. Over the past 12 months, Postini saw the number of spam messages grow by 147 percent, up 73 percent in the last three months alone. Due to explosive growth in the use of images and documents in spam messages, the total size of spam flowing through Postini's data centers grew by an unprecedented 334 percent since November 2005.

Each day in November, Postini saw more than one million unique Internet addresses participate in spam and virus attacks. Spammers also deployed broad and sophisticated viruses designed to add to their massive networks of hijacked personal computers called "bot-nets" to generate even more spam. The warezov / stration worm, which harvests email addresses and turns infected personal computers into spam-spewing zombies was particularly active in November.