Just pause before you forward that e-mail joke or petition to your friends and colleagues. You will probably find you are straining the relationship.

A leading researcher analysing the issue of spam in Australia said a survey she conducted earlier this year revealed that Australian employees were "most annoyed by chain e-mails" from family and friends. She said the Australian experience closely reflected the United States, where individuals typically received 1,500 chain e-mails a year from family and friends.

Dr Monica Whitty, a researcher at the Social Justice, Social Change Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, told ZDNet Australia   chain e-mails represented a real problem in this country.

"We found that quite a large number of people thought that chain e-mails are objectionable," Whitty said. "They're often petitions or jokes, things friends might think we find interesting, but often we find it annoying and more work to get through."

The problem is apparently being exacerbated by a lack of communication of corporate e-mail policies and the fledgling status of e-mail etiquette. Whitty said she had found about a third of employees in Australia were unsure whether their workplace had an e-mail policy or not. "They need to be more transparent to people within the workplace," she said. Additionally, individuals and organisations need to reconsider what is appropriate net etiquette.

"We're still, as a society, trying to deal with this new technology and find what's appropriate and what's not appropriate," she added, comparing it to the evolving etiquette faced by mobile phone users. She said organisations were only now starting to realise the urgency of the problem. Dr Whitty is conducting further research into the issue, with would-be respondents able to complete the survey here.

One information technology manager, Canterbury City Council's Dean Galvin, said his organisation faced a healthy task keeping spam under control and described e-mail filtering software as one of the council's most important IT assets.

"Junk e-mail is now so prolific that, at times, between 30 and 40 percent of e-mail coming into our network is not business related. Recently we had 56Mb of non work related Mpeg files entering our system in a 24 hour period," Galvin said.

The situation is similarly dire in the US. According to a US survey conducted by research company InsightExpress for security company Symantec, 84 percent of respondents believed spam places a burden on their individual time. Almost two-thirds reported spending more than 10 minutes a day dealing with spam, with almost a quarter needing more than 20 minutes each day to deal with it.

The survey also revealed people were most concerned about receiving pornographic or otherwise inappropriate spam, with 38 percent reporting this as their primary concern. Thirty six percent responded that it takes too much time to delete or unsubscribe to spam messages.

Charles Heunemann, the managing director of SurfControl Australia, said separate research commissioned by SurfControl and conducted by research company Market Facts in the US revealed that each piece of unwanted e-mail cost companies almost AU$2 in lost productivity.

"So 'friendly' junk e-mail could cost a company with 500 employees $AUD1.3 million each year," Heunemann said.

Network administrators bear the brunt of the problem, with one in four spending more than an hour each day managing spam.

Although some people in Australia are clamouring for legislation against spam, the government argues such a solution is extremely difficult to implement

"You don't want draconian solutions that are worse than the problem. It's a nuisance at the moment but if it started to clog up the system then we might have a very different view," Senator Richard Alston told ZDNet Australia   during a recent interview. He said a preferred solution was for the market to provide a solution to the spam problem.

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