Despite a majority of e-mail being junk, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has admitted that it has failed to take legal steps against SPAMMERS. Anti-SPAM campaigners have responded to brand the governments laws 'a waste of time and public money':

In an email to ZDNet UK sister site silicon.com, the ICO wrote: "As breaches of these regulations are not criminal offences there can not be any prosecutions. Putting this into context with other complaints we receive under the same and previous legislation, we receive far more complaints about direct marketing faxes and have been successful in taking enforcement action in 13 cases of breaches by fax companies."

Anti-spam campaigner Spamhaus has hit out at the ICO for failing to control spammers. Steve Linford, director of Spamhaus, said: "If I was a spammer I'd love Britain. I can spam as much as I like and I get an office who deals with opting people out of my lists for free; I don't even need to pay staff to do it for me as they're paid by the government.

"The reality is that spammers in the UK can spam the entire country and at the very worst they might get a letter some months later from the ICO asking them to stop spamming Mrs Jones of Richmond."

Having ourselves tested trying to make an official complaint about SPAM, we can state that it's not an easy process and often requires details that simply don't exist or can't be found unless you actually visit the product being advertised - clever.

The ICO suggests that until such laws are improved, consumers should complain to their ISP's. Typically there's a fundamental difference between simply filtering out SPAM (often kills legitimate mail too) and preventing its authors from continued abuse.

Sadly this is all nothing new and despite persistent complaints the government has failed to grasp just how seriously SPAM is affecting Internet life. More @ ZDNet.