I hate spam – and I am not talking about spam with a big initial S, a delightful tinned pork which is amazing when turned into fritters, but you have to be wrinkly to remember it…

David Snook

No. I refer to the rubbish sent to my inbox by people who are simply pests. I rejoice that someone, somewhere, is taking real action against this particular type of pest. Canada introduced a new anti-spam law in July, covering email messages sent from or received in Canada. You have to have express consent of the Canadian recipient or you break the law. How they can make that stick if you are in another country, however, concerns me.

And you have to have a “functional” unsubscribe mechanism – most of them aren’t functional in my experience. You can be fined up to C$10m for breaking the regulation, apparently.

I wish fervently that all countries would follow suit; indeed, I wish anti-spam laws were extended to other fields. For example, Royal Mail shovel unwanted, unaddressed advertising material through my letter box, simply to make money from local retailers. And then Royal Mail make it very, very difficult to opt out.

I am pig-headed enough to work my way through all the impediments to secure an opt-out status. The phone too is used to pester me several times a day, all from foreign countries and often I am dragged to the phone to find there is no-one there, or a recorded message tries to make me buy something or a real person wants to “conduct a survey.”

But it is the spam through my email that annoys most. They exhort me to gamble (Ruby Casino is the worst offender, wherever that is) and there is no unsubscribe and although you can block the sender address, they use literally hundreds of drone addresses from which to send gambling invitations.

And of course there are the ones offering me pills (often many from Canada, so that is going to be interesting). And again, many from folk inviting me to enlarge certain parts of my rotund anatomy which I have not, for demographical reasons, even seen for years.

Dangerous ones are those purporting to come from Paypal, eBay, Google, banks and utility companies and there are several of those every day. The sheer scale of the scamming, spamming, phishing, whatever you want to call it, is frightening. There are incalculable numbers of thieves, crooks and criminals around in this sad world, it seems.

What Canada has done is a small step in the right direction. Every country now needs to enact something similar or more widely-applied, but for once bring in a regulation and then enforce it. That’s the most frustrating part of laudable legislation - it often isn’t enforced. Grump of the day over.