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More than 95% of e-mail is junk, be it spam, error messages or viruses, report mail monitoring firms.

Analysis of the contents of millions of e-mails has revealed that less than 4% is legitimate traffic.

Further work has shown that most of this junk mail is originating on hijacked home computers.

E-mail security firm Return Path said 99% of the computers it monitors that send mail have been taken over by spammers or virus writers.

Return Path reached its estimate by calculating a "reputation score" for the 20 million net addresses of those machines.

The score was derived by analyzing the e-mail traffic sent through those addresses, the number of complaints filed about that address, and if the owner of that address responds to complaints.

The vast majority of these net addresses were not good net citizens, said George Bilbrey, spokesman for Return Path.

Only 1% of net addresses could be regarded as legitimate sources of mail.

The rest, said Mr Bilbrey, were hijacked computers, or bots, used by spammers and other net criminals to send e-mail.

Zombie take-over

Typically these home computers are compromised by viruses sent in e-mail messages or by worms that trawl the net looking for vulnerable machines.

Matt Peachey, regional director for IronPort, which monitors about a quarter of all mail sent across the net, said its research revealed that about 80% of e-mail came from compromised hosts.

Though, he said there were some cases such as with Polish Telecom where that percentage was likely to be much higher.

The vast majority of the 170,000 net addresses sending e-mail from Polish Telecom were probably zombies, he said.

Ironport's analysis of the e-mail traffic sent to large corporations reveals that more and more of the messages are junk that is not worth reading.

Mr Peachey said statistics for one of its customers show that from 20 June to 20 July only 4% of the messages received were legitimate.

Of the rest, he said, 70% were spam, 11% were bounces or error messages and 9% was viruses.

On average, said Mr Peachey, only about 10% of e-mail was now real. By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News website

Have a happy-email day!