"Hello, could I speak to Mr... Crickshaw? Crankshaft? Crewickshank?"

"No. (click)"

I'm not a fan of cold calling, whether it's for double glazing, roofing, 'free' holidays (how naïve can people be?) or any other pointless marketing tat. Fortunately there are organisations you can contact to have your name placed on an exclusion list, which seems to work quite well. A month after contacting the relevant organisation, the number of 'moron calls' I receive dropped significantly.

It's a shame there isn't a similar system for e-mails. A lot of words have been written over the past few months about the increasing problem with spam (i.e. unwanted and unsolicited e-mail). Free e-mail accounts, it seems, are particularly vulnerable, with Microsoft's Hotmail being picked out as a particular problem case - hardly surprising given its vast number of users. Is it all a storm in a teacup, or have the spam floodgates really opened?

In order to find out, last week I set up a Hotmail account with a distinctly unguessable address; basically a string of random numbers and letters with no real words in it. I then sent one e-mail from this account to a friend. Within a day there were 14 spam e-mails in that account.

How did this happen? Is there an automated spamming engine somewhere on the net that continuously tries to send spam to random e-mail addresses? It's statistically unlikely that any spam-bot would find my 'unguessable' address so quickly. Does Microsoft arrange for these mails to arrive to encourage me to upgrade to their 'spam-filtered' account? That's also unlikely, even for the conspiracy theorists.

So maybe someone's accessing intermediate e-mail servers and harvesting e-mails that pass through them? That's a bit more probable, since e-mails are sent as plain text with no header encryption, so it's relatively easy to extract the addresses.

Whatever the cause, it's very irritating, not to mention time-consuming and bandwidth-wasting. And the solution? Open your wallet. Automated spam-filtering engines, such as those supplied with some free e-mail accounts, don't work too well. They search for keywords in subject lines or the body text and look to see that the e-mail headers aren't forged.

But it's tricky to get the balance right. Too strict and you risk cutting out some legitimate e-mails, too lax and the spam gets through. Human checks are required if you want to be really sure. And that's expensive, so the customer has to pay. Several new initiatives that let Web users share information about spam mail may offer a cheaper solution, but these haven't been properly tested yet.

In the meantime, the lesson is clear; you get what you pay for. Free e-mail accounts are rapidly becoming unusable, so if you value the purity of your inbox, and don't want it full of adverts for 'free' holidays, get rich quick scams, animal porn and Viagra deals, do yourself a favour and pay for an account from a proper ISP. As a bonus, there's less chance of them deleting your account through lack of use if you go on holiday for a few weeks.

Tags: hotmail e-mail spam email address internet service provider e-mail filtering spam email facebook