ISP PlusNet, who have seen quite a few mail problems in the past, hope it's customers will have a 'spam free' email service for it's 200,000 customers.

Improvements for the BT owned ISP include using Postini technology from early next year to filter its incoming email, this will reduce the number of spam messages reaching their mail servers, meaning there will be less risk of them becoming overwhelmed.

Customers will also be able to add email addresses to blacklists manually and will have the option of putting suspicious messages in quarantine.

Hopefully they will be able to keep legitimate emails and avoid seeing them 'lost' again, Laycock says that there had been a "significant investment in infrastructure" since the email problems occurred.