Fri Mar 23, 1:48 AM ET

MANILA (AFP) - Almost 70 percent of all electronic mail from Asia is "spam", or unsolicited advertisements, an anti-virus firm said Friday.

The Philippines had the worst record with spam making up 88 percent of all emails, Symantec Corp. said in excerpts of its Internet Threat Security Report released here.

The average percentage of emails sent from the Asia-Pacific region that were spam was 69 percent, the report added.

Although the Philippines had the highest proportion of spam, China was the largest source of spam by sheer volume, the report said.

Thirty-seven percent of all spam detected from Asia-Pacific originated from China.

Symantec said in a statement that it could not provide the total number of e-mails monitored but that the results was based on data from over two million "decoy accounts" attracting email from 20 different countries.

It also uses a statistical sampling of networks used by Symantec's customers, the statement said.

[link to news.yahoo.com]