Is this the unluckiest spam recipient in Britain?

Anybody despairing at the amount of spam they're receiving in their inbox may do well to consider the plight of one UK IT manager who has had to deal with around 500,000 unsolicited emails in just two months.

silicon.com was contacted by the IT manager of a UK firm who wished to remain anonymous ealier this week. Since November 2002, his company has been inundated with a barrage of spam, at the rate of around 8,500 emails per day.

While returning to work after Christmas was a chore for most of us, New Year was made all the worse for this IT manager - we'll call him James - by the fact that his mail server had received more than a quarter of a million unsolicited emails during the festive period - racking up 262,977 unwanted emails between 20 December 2002 and 2 January 2003.

While the problem has now been largely brought under control through the use of filtering software, James estimates that this deluge has cost him at least 10 full working days during November and December - and became so time-consuming he was even forced to turn to outside contractors to help alleviate the pressure.

Even now, constant monitoring of the filters for false-positive interceptions - where valid emails are deleted because they contain certain keywords - is an ongoing problem.

Putting an actual cost on the spam overhead is difficult, but the company's MD told silicon.com that his turnover is between £9m and £10m per year and said email is a critical tool in conducting around 90 per cent of transactions. It is easy to imagine the damage done by the two month long bandwidth-sapping spam attack.

Similarly, on top of James' own time spent dealing with the problem - and therefore being unable to touch other projects - the contractors brought in to help were paid around £600 per day.

The company has also lost all business from private customers using @msn, @hotmail, @lycos and @yahoo email addresses - as these, which were the most common senders' addresses, have now all been blocked.

James' firm, along with many others, could be being targeted by unscrupulous marketers generating random email addresses using his company's domain in the same way millions of spam emails are sent to 'all.possible.addresses@hotmail.com'.

However, there are also fears within the company that the attack may be of a malicious nature.

At the peak of the problem the sheer weight of email traffic caused a day's downtime for the Exchange server.