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Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam, wonderful Spam'. So goes the line sung by the vikings in the corner of the cafe in the Monty Python sketch that became the source for the name of this most unlovely and less-than-wonderful nuisance that awaits us every time we open our inbox these days.

I get around 3,000 of the blessed things every week, and yes, I've got all the anti-this and anti-that software tools that weed-out the majority of it, and dump it in a folder so that, in theory, I don't have to do anything about it. Except that, of course, I do, because occasionally, however good the software is, it zaps something it shouldn't, and that could just be the one business e-mail that is of real importance. Then there's the percentage that the software misses, and that has to be winkled-out manually. It all takes time, and it's time that could be much better devoted to other activities, like earning the cash to buy the software programmes in the first place!

Even with all the sophistication, I still reckon that I spend a minimum of fifteen minutes a day dealing with spam one way or another, every day of the year; that's getting-on for two hours a week. Put a value on that of, say, ten pounds an hour, and I've wasted around one thousand pounds a year on the stuff. If you expand that to merely two percent of the UK population, that's more than a billion pounds a year taken out of the economy. But, of course, that is an estimate well towards the lower end of the real cost to our economy.

So what have I spent that money on? Well, among other things, offers of miracle penis extension products, counterfeit goods, bogus viagra pills, forged diplomas, investment scams, human-trafficked mail-order brides and so on. At the very least, these are all undesirable, and certainly contain nothing that I would have even the remotest interest in enquiring about, let alone acquiring. In reality, and without putting any veneer on it, these are inducements to become involved in some form of illegal activity. In which case why am I wasting my money on countering them, that's what I pay my government to do for me, isn't it?

In the US, there have been several high-profile cases recently, that have resulted in jail-terms for the convicted spammers; so is there an equivalent deterrent here in the UK? Well, since the end of 2003 new regulations have applied to e-mail marketing, making spamming illegal. There is even an umbrella EC Directive enabling these. Apparently, all you have to do is

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