Spam now makes up 95%+ of all emails. The BBC reports that most of this spam comes from zombie computers -- computers taken over by spammers using bots and worms.
Analysis of the contents of millions of e-mails has revealed that less than 4% is legitimate traffic.
Further work has shown that most of this junk mail is originating on hijacked home computers.
E-mail security firm Return Path said 99% of the computers it monitors that send mail have been taken over by spammers or virus writers.
Return Path reached its estimate by calculating a "reputation score" for the 20 million net addresses of those machines.
Some of the spam is very strange and seemingly pointless like hobbit spam, which uses random bits of prose from Tolkein emails.
