86 percent of e-mail traffic is spam

"Of the 25 billion messages we processed in May, an astounding 86 percent were malicious or spam," said Andrew Lochart, senior director of marketing for Postini, a messaging security firm based in San Carlos, Calif.

As if that wasn't enough of a headache for corporate IT departments, instant messaging spam soared by 500 percent last month, just as businesses are embracing the technology for customer communications, and increasing their own usage of IM by 138 percent.