The scourge of spam email is here to stay for the long term, although new technology and policy initiatives should contain the problem in the future, a senior Microsoft executive told a conference in Dublin yesterday.

Mr George Webb, business manager anti-spam technology and strategy at Microsoft, said the US technology firm was intercepting 2.4 billion spam emails every day, which amounted to 75 per cent of all its email traffic.

Most of the spam messages are being sent to the hundreds of millions of customers who use Microsoft's free email service Hotmail.

Spam, or unsolicited commercial email messages that are sent to people's email inboxes, now accounts for more than 50 per cent of global emails.

Mr Webb said Microsoft was taking new steps to combat the spammers including filing lawsuits and introducing new filtering technologies. One of these new technologies is SmartScreen which makes an educated guess at whether an email is spam or a genuine message. It has already been incorporated into Microsoft Outlook 2003, Hotmail and MSN.

Mr Roger Dean, founder of the European Electronic Messaging Association, which was hosting the conference, said spam cost business at least a week per year in lost productivity. He said recent legislative changes in the US and EU to introduce tough new penalties against spam would not solve the problem because many of the spammers were located outside these areas.

Mr Joe Meade, the Irish data protection commissioner, said an EU directive outlawing spam which was introduced last month had raised hopes that spam would end. "The new regulations with their punitive fines of €3,000 per message will definitely help to combat spam but the regulations alone are not the silver bullet that some hope for."