Criminal gangs, as well as established marketing firms, are taking advantage of the Electronic Communications Directive, which became law last month, to make Britain one of the world’s fastest- growing sources of spam.

For the first time, Britain is among the top ten originators of spam, which now accounts for about 15 billion daily e-mails around the world. AOL handles almost three billion junk e-mails a day, typically promising an enhanced male anatomy or drugs such as Viagra at blackmarket rates.

With spam now accounting for about 70 per cent of all e-mail traffic, a proportion that is rising rapidly, experts say that it could render e-mail virtually unusable within a year.

Most recent spam has originated in the United States, China and South Korea, with Britain barely attracting the attention of regulators. But last month, for the first time, Britain overtook India to become one of the ten main offenders.

There are now about 25 British-based internet service providers, and some of them account for thousands of internet addresses from which spam is being sent, according to the Spamhaus Project, a non-profit body run by volunteers that tracks known spammers and publishes their internet addresses so that internet service providers can block anything sent from them.

“The British problem has only just come to our attention in the past few weeks,” said Steve Linford, who runs Spamhaus from a houseboat on the Thames near Hampton Court. His website enjoys publishing death threats received and warnings that it will be sued for “deformation”.

This growth in spam in Britain appears to be directly related to the new law, which makes it a criminal offence, punishable by a fine, to send spam to private e-mail addresses after the Information Commissioner has issued an enforcement order.

After intense lobbying by the marketing industry, the Department of Trade and Industry agreed that business e-mail addresses should be exempted from the law.

According to Mr Linford, this has given spammers a justification for claiming that their unregulated sales pitches are solely intended for business in-boxes.

“We warned the Government that if it tried to regulate spam, rather than ban it, it would only legitimise it,” Mr Linford said.

The main operators send an average of 80 million spam e-mails a day, Mr Linford said, with a target of one sale per million.

“If they sell 80 packets of Viagra a day, that’s a lot of money from one PC on the kitchen table,” he said. Last August, a security flaw at a website selling a herbal supplement claiming to bring about penis enlargement revealed the scale of the business. In one month, 6,000 people replied to e-mails and ordered the supplement, at $50 (£28) a bottle.

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