This is the view of eCorner managing director, John Debrincat, who claims Australia is lacking when it comes to spam and phishing filtering.

"It is one of the major inhibitors to successful e-commerce adoption in this country. It's leaving ISPs and their customers exposed to risk of existing and emerging messaging threats," Debrincat said.

"Spam, phishing, viruses and other unwanted mail account for more than 90 percent of the 100 billion messages sent every day.

"To address the spread of all forms of messaging abuse you need a large pool of providers giving input. We don't have a large enough information pool in Australia to trap the real problem messages with the local filtering and security products many ISPs rely on."

Debrincat said local ISPs need access to a global pool of data to protect their customer base and their businesses from existing and new classes of messaging threats including image spam, virus mutations, zombie attacks and VOIP phishing.