There has been a significant rise in the amount of spam emails from the .cn domain according to the security software company Symantec.

The .cn domain is China's top level domain.

However, there has been a drop in the levels of spam originating from Hong Kong, traditionally one of the most popular places to disseminate junk emails from, Symantec noted.

Hong Kong has recently instituted wide-ranging new anti-spam laws.

Charles Mok Lai-kwong, the chairman of the Hong Kong Internet Society, told Hong Kong's South China Morning Post that spam has gone down by at least one-third.

He said: "We have observed from local internet providers that the volume of spam has been decreasing over the past year by about 30 percent."

There has also been a significant drop in the amount of image spam being disseminated. In July ten percent of spam messages were image spam, in contrast to 50 percent earlier in 2007.