According to the MessageLabs Intelligence Report on spam from Symantec, spam is growing across the globe thanks to automated translation services and templates. internetnews.com reports that local language spam now makes up 46 percent of spam in Germany, 53 percent in France, and 62.3 percent in Japan.

The spam letters are the same, but the templates allow spammers to engineer translation on the fly. The templates also allow spammers to change company names, domain names and other references as part of the automation process.

The report also touches on other threat trends, including these: One in 295.2 e-mails in July contained malware, and URL-shortened spam accounted for as much as 6.2 percent of all spam.