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For the past few months, I've been considering cancelling a mail account that's been my main host for personal email for nearly ten years. You already know the reason from the title of this column - spam. Anyone who's had the same email address for some time, and used it to register with websites or to post Usenet messages, will know what I'm talking about. I don't mind Amazon telling me that there are some titles I might find interesting, even if I don't want to buy Scooby-Doo for £9.99. I don't mind Autobytel letting me know of a special offer on an Audi S8 - just a snip at £53,000. Maybe one day I'll be in the market to upgrade my trusty hatchback.

No, what I'm talking about is all those mails offering a service to enlarge parts of my anatomy, sell me 'herbal remedies', clear up my bad credit or give me supposedly free access to surveillance devices strategically placed in an all-girls college dorm. I know it's not just me - my female colleagues get similar junk mail. In fact, a few years ago I registered a new Hotmail address to use when travelling, and when I opened the inbox for the first time a few days later, never having sent a single email from it, I found similar spam already there, as if such things came free with every email account.

Spam is seemingly inescapable. The current estimate is one spam in every three emails, and it's rising. Next year, analysts reckon more than 50 per cent of all emails sent will be spam. While that's already

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true of physical letters delivered to my home by the Royal Mail, I don't find physical junk mail nearly so intrusive or annoying. For a start, I never get pornographic circulars through the post. It's also a lot quicker to pull out the letters I do want to read from the junk and leave the others, probably never to be opened. However, with email, if you enjoy the convenience of the preview pane, it's often impossible to avoid an eyeful of something quite embarrassing before the trusty Delete key can be called into action.

Something even worse happened to my email account a few months ago. I suddenly began receiving hundreds of bounced emails. The ISP I use for my personal email gives every user their own subdomain name, so you can have as many email addresses in that subdomain as you like. Somebody had invented an email address that was supposedly in my subdomain and started to use it as the reply address for a massive spam campaign. Heaven only knows how many mails were being sent, as I was only getting the bounces from email addresses that didn't exist - and even that was up to a thousand mails a day.

I emailed the abuse department of my ISP, asking them to do something about it, but all I received from repeated attempts at contact was one pro forma response saying that my original email had been received, thank you very much. I eventually resolved the problem by setting my mail client to reject mails intended for the spam address, which meant my system took hours to download mail everyday, but eventually the problem went away, no thanks to my ISP.

I won't tell you who my ISP is, because I don't want to use my elevated platform to attack a company that has otherwise given me a reliable service over many years. However, it does pinpoint how little most ISPs think about the actual email service their users get, not just in terms of spam but also viruses. ISPs are quite within their rights to say that messages passing through their systems are no concern of theirs, and they in fact would be infringing privacy to tamper with them.