The US has been named the top spam-relaying country in the world in a recent new report. In the first quarter of 2007 almost a fifth of all spam originated in the United States, while China and, surprisingly, Poland were also in the top 3 of the junk mail ratings.

Exactly half the top dozen were European countries, with Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Russia joining Poland in the rankings. South Korea, India and Taiwan represented Asia, leaving the remaining spot to Brazil. This ratio is consistent with continental-wide figures for spam relaying: Europe accounted for 35.1% of junk email in the first quarter of 2007, closely followed by Asia (33.4%) and then North America (22.9%). Australasia comes in at the tail end of the list with 0.6% of the world’s spam volume.

Another recent study has shown that this volume of spam also has a significant impact on productivity, as it costs US businesses an estimated $71 billion annually. Figures from a survey have shown that business computer users spend 1.2% of their time dealing with the consequences of having spam in their email inboxes, which is down from 3.1% three years ago. Despite this drop one worrying statistics remains a constant – two thirds of junk emails actually get into people’s inboxes, evading anti-spam filters and other defensive technology.