Budget airline EasyJet has cut spam by 65 per cent and improved worker productivity after upgrading its email security technology.

The company's 3,500 email users were receiving up to 400 spam emails a day before EasyJet decided to switch to a managed email security service from BlackSpider in April.

The airline, which processes an average of 50,000 emails a day, has also significantly reduced the number of email-borne viruses and types of harmful software infecting its systems.

'While the amount of spam we received was below the industry average, the number of emails carrying potentially damaging viruses was much, much higher, at over 25 per cent of all our email,' said Bill Codd, IT director at EasyJet.

'Since implementing BlackSpider's MailControl service we have noticed a 65 per cent reduction in email traffic and we do not get any email viruses at all.'

On a single day the security system stopped 400 copies of the same virus from infecting computers. 'The technology even started catching these several hours before anti-virus vendors had released signature updates,' said Codd.

EasyJet's IT department has also cut the time it spends cleaning email, from up to two hours a day to less than one hour a week. With 95 per cent of all flight bookings sold online and confirmed by email, improved email security is also saving time for customer service staff.

'Our contact centre staff are saving an hour each day that they used to spend sifting through email to find the genuine bookings,' said Codd.