E-mails offering Viagra via the net

Every person on the net has one thing in common. They all hate spam.

Anyone who has an e-mail account will have received these unsolicited commercial messages that offer you things you do not want, at prices you will not pay, from companies you will never call.

2002 was a bumper year for these messages and now 30% of all mail flying around the net is thought to be spam.

Filtering firm Surf Control has compiled a list of the top 10 most annoying spam messages sent across the net in the last 12 months.

Message overload

Unsurprisingly, top of the list were messages with a sexual theme.

Spam top 10

Free adult site passwords Low price drugs (Viagra) Refinance your mortgage Nigerian confidential money transfer Tiny remote control car Best online casino #1 Pasta pot Get out of credit card debt Meet singles in your area Copy DVDs in one click

The most annoying spam purported to pass on to people free passwords for sex sites that usually levy a charge to look beyond the front page.

Next on the list was a pharmaceutical service offering people the sex drug Viagra.

Also on the list of most annoying spam messages were those asking people to help get money out of various African nations.

These 419 scams as they are called are entirely bogus but regularly catch out gullible net users who let their greed overwhelm their common sense.

Costly business

Surf Control estimates that spam costs businesses around the world about $9billion a year to deal with.

This estimate includes the time it takes people to delete the messages, the cost of buying larger mail servers and storage systems to cope with in-boxes flooded with the messages and the cost of having staff unclog networks overloaded by spam.

There is little sign of an end to unsolicited mail.

Last year, one in 12 e-mails passing through MessageLabs' filter system was identified as spam.

The e-mail filtering company has warned of a dramatic rise in the amount of spam clogging in-boxes

It says the amount of spam will exceed normal e-mails by around July.