On top of this says Osterman Research, 87% of respondents believe it is important or extremely important for email providers to actively eliminate zombies - a primary source of outbound spam - from their networks.

The report, sponsored by Commtouch, generated four main conclusions: outbound spam is a serious issue today and the problem is getting worse; and that conventional remediation efforts and technologies focused on outbound spam are no longer adequate to fully solve the problem.

The study also concluded that new technologies and approaches are necessary to ensure that outbound spam is minimised in service provider networks.

The final major conclusion is that many customers will switch to those service providers that they feel address the outbound spam problem in a granular way.

The survey - which took in responses from 100 web hosting companies and 266 end users of internet service providers - also found that conventional solutions can result in a very high level of false positives, disgruntled customers, higher costs and lost business.

More than half of end users whose outbound email was blocked because of their providers' outbound spam problem said they would probably or definitely switch to a provider that would not block innocent users.

As reported previously by Infosecurity, almost 40% of respondents have had their IP addresses listed on Real Time Blackhole Lists (RBLs) in the past 12 months alone.

The good news is that 70% of service providers are in the process of evaluating solutions for their outbound spam problem. Half, meanwhile, expect to deploy a solution within the next 12 months.

Full details of the study can be found in the free report, which is available for download here