Ninety six per cent of all email is now spam, according to the latest figures from security software firm SoftScan.

Spam is also more difficult to identify because the grammar and spelling is far more convincing to native speakers of a language than before.

"Local language spam has normally been easy for users to spot as it had obviously been translated electronically," said Diego d'Ambra, chief technology officer of SoftScan.

Spam levels have been more than 90 per cent for six consecutive months. And at weekends, when there is less legitimate business email, junk levels are consistently higgher than 98 per cent of traffic.

However the amount of viruses within email messages appears to have fallen to just 0.08 per cent of email scanned.