HE received 30,000 spam e-mail messages in just six hours.

Mr K M Tan, 53, a managing director in a food-packing company, found his company e-mail account flooded with them.

Mr Tan said: 'Usually, I get about a few hundred spam e-mail messages a day.

'The most I had received was between 2,000 and 3,000.

'Getting 30,000 in a day is irritating.'

Mr Tan said the barrage of spam mail came on Monday between 9am and 3pm - all sent from the same e-mail address.

Mr Tan showed The New Paper his inbox at his office. It showed 29,000 unread spam messages after he deleted about 1,000 of them.

The e-mail address seem to be from the United States.

The subject title of the messages stated: 'Returned mail: see transcript for details.'

In the body of the messages were other addresses.

Presumably, the messages were to notify the recipient that his e-mail message did not go through due to invalid e-mail addresses.

But the e-mail address of Mr Tan's company was not found in the messages.

Mr Tan said: 'There is no purpose in sending such messages to me.

'It's not advertising for anything or trying to con me, like those Nigerian e-mail scams.

'They only take up my time. It's frustrating to keep getting them.'

Mr Tan called up SingNet's customer support service to make a report on the sameday.

SingNet confirmed the report.

Its spokesman said Mr Tan was hit by a 'denial of service attack'.

SingNet said: 'Denial of service attack is a type of attack on a network, designed to bring down the network by flooding it with useless traffic.

'We have assisted Mr Tan by blocking such e-mail messages routed to his inbox.

'Mr Tan confirmed that his Internet service was working on the same day.'

SingNet advises Internet users to avoid registering their e-mail addresses at Internet sites which may make them vulnerable to unwanted mail.

Also, users are advised not to visit 'suspicious sites' such as gambling and adult websites 'which may inconspicuously gather information about their system data'.

Users can also subscribe to anti-spam features offered by Internet service providers (ISPs) such as SingNet.

Earlier in April, the Parliament passed the Spam Control Bill.

LOSS IN PRODUCTIVITY

Dr Lee Boon Yang, the Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, said that $23 million is lost in productivity because of e-mail spam.

Just before the Bill was passed, he added in Parliament that the three major ISPs in Singapore receive close to 5,000 spam-related complaints a month.

The Bill does not make spamming a criminal offence.

But individuals or companies can take civil action against spammers and can be awarded damages of up to $25 per message sent.

Total damages are capped at $1 million.

The Bill does not apply to foreign spammers, though.

Four out of five spam e-mail messages are from overseas, Dr Lee said.