Spam levels in Australia have now outstripped those seen in Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada and even the United States - Symantec says.

The ratio of spam in email traffic (from new and previously unknown bad sources) monitored for the UK rose by 25.6 percent in April to take it to a staggering 94 percent. However, perhaps the biggest surprise was that Australia with 87.8 percent has more spam than the United States which sits on 79.4 percent.

That makes Australia the fifth most spammed country on the planet, behind the UK, China and Hong Kong. It has just 0.1 percent less spam than India in fourth place on the list.

Compare this with August last year, when iTWire reported that Australia had spam levels of just 66.5 percent and it becomes obvious that something has gone very wrong.

And what is all that spam about? Well according to the report the top five spam verticals are retail, automotive, manufacturing, recreation (fnarr fnarr) and marketing. Hmm, retail and recreation huh? I guess we are still buying lots of spammed sex and drugs then.

Globally, spam has risen by almost ten percent in a single month to reach heights not seen since by MessageLabs traffic monitoring since September 2007.

Paul Wood, the senior MessageLabs Intelligence analyst with Symantec says "Image spam was a phenomena that peaked in 2007, and now we see spammers recycling their techniques in the hope of repeating history."

Whereas image spam has preciously relied upon attachments containing the spam content, now the spam images are being hosted on 'trustworthy' sites and taking advantage of what Symantec refers to as "redirection links from reputable sites" so as to obfuscate the true location of that hosting.

The technique enables spammers to evade spam filtering by those applications which examine hyperlink domains within the email to assess the risk of it being spam related.