64% of May e-mail was spam

About 64% of e-mail monitored in May by spam-filtering company Brightmail was spam. That is up from 58% in December, Brightmail says. What that means for the bottom line: It costs companies nearly $2,000 per employee a year in lost productivity, double from a year ago, Nucleus Research says. Russian mail service Yandex.ru, which provides daily statistics on spam monitoring, claims that it's between 50% and 80% for Russian users. Yandex runs a free Web mail offering unlimited mailboxes, so it's possible Yandex gets more spam, since its users open up a free e-mail account just for that purpose.