Spam has been getting some positive headlines recently.

Disc jockey Neil "Doctor" Fox has been named Celebrity Spam Fan of the Year at a ceremony in London.

He said: "As a kid I used to love Spam and nowadays it's still as good as it always was."

This surprised me a fair bit, as did my discovery of a dedicated fan club with 2,500 members because everyone I know keeps complaining about the stuff.

Then I realised he was talking about Spam, the chopped pork and ham, which fills our bellies, not spam, the unwanted advertising messages, which packs our email inboxes.

The bad news for the majority of us who are sick and tired of the increasing amount of commercial email we receive is there's more to come.

Research by email publishers emedia showed about 90 per cent of the companies surveyed were planning to increase their email marketing budgets in the next year.

Seven out of ten companies had found email was the most effective marketing tool for generating those all-important sales leads. About 95 per cent said getting people's permission to send commercial email -

opt-in email - was "essential, very or quite important" when using email lists.

While this is encouraging, I wish there was more scope for opt-out lists - a really winning marketing strategy.

Meanwhile, the snappily titled Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services (ICSTIS), the premium-rate telephone services watchdog, has said it will come down hard on text messaging scams, which have been steadily growing in number.

Director George Kidd said:

"The use of text messaging to promote premium-rate services has many obvious consumer benefits when carried out in a legitimate, responsible manner and in compliace with our code of practice.

"However, we will not hesitate to take swift action against the small minority of service providers who think they can abuse public confidence and trust in text messaging in order to make money with no regard for consumers whatsoever."

Last month, ICSTIS slapped a £50,000 fine on Leeds-based Moby Monkey for sending misleading spam text messages.

Its lastest report revealed it had also fined Doncaster-based Courier Link £1,500 for sending text messages advising people to call a premium-rate number to stop spam text messages.

Whatever happens, we should all be preparing for a future of digitised spam, which sounds even less appealing than Dr Fox's favourite snack.

www.spam.com/fc.htm
www.emedia.co.uk
www.icstis.org.uk