Email spam levels have reached a twelve-year low according to research from Symantec.

The company released its June Intelligence Report looking at targeted attacks and phishing, vulnerabilities, malware, mobile and social media, and of course spam.

“There is good news this month on the email-based front of the threat landscape,” it says. “According to our metrics, the overall spam rate has dropped to 49.7 percent. This is the first time this rate has fallen below 50 percent of email for over a decade. The last time Symantec recorded a similar spam rate was clear back in September of 2003.”

The mining sector had the highest spam rate at over 56%.

All organization sizes had around a 52-53% spam rate according to the study, but those with 251-500 employees had the highest rate at 53.2%.

“Phishing rates and email-based malware were also down this month,” the summary says. “However, there were 57.6 million new malware variants created in June, up from 44.5 million pieces of malware created in May and 29.2 million in April. This increase in activity lends more evidence to the idea that, with the continued drops in email-based malicious activity, attackers are simply moving to other areas of the threat landscape”

You can find the full report here.

Images via Wikimedia Commons, Symnatec