You shall consider a folder  in your directories for the classpath content so that its content will be copied to the WEB-INF/classes during your build process.

If your using MyEclipse for Spring development  then put  your .property file  under the Source
folder instead of putting it in a package
for ex:-
Java Src --
log4j.properties
message.properties

or else u may have to configure it manually in appbeans.xml in Spring to load the message files

Just put  it in the src folder  (with the same packaging) instead of the
classes folder,so every time  you rebuild you project, eclipse  copy it
to the classes  folder automatically.