Sixty-five percent of all emails sent in June were spam, which is up 8 percent from three years ago, according to email monitoring company Brightmail.

Spam is not expected to decrease as it continues to grow steadily, and legislation such as the CAN-SPAM Act will have little effect, Brightmail told VNUnet.com.

"People are underestimating the spammers," Enrique Salem, senior vice president of gateway solutions at Brightmail, told VNUnet.com. "These figures are dramatic. In many ways it's almost a denial of service attack on the email infrastructure. There's a fundamental flaw in the infrastructure: when email was designed we weren't thinking about spam or phishing."

The latest numbers also indicate that non-English language spam has grown: 16 percent of spam is in other languages, reflecting the increasingly international nature of Web traffic.

Brightmail also said that the increase of phishing attacks is not only having drastic financial effects on those caught, but may be harming the public's confidence with online enterprises.

The company called for a public education campaign by government and industry to teach users how to surf the Internet safely.