An internet company has been ordered to pay damages of £750 to the recipient of an unwanted advertising e-mail, in what is set to be a landmark ruling on the cost of spam.

Gordon Dick, of Edinburgh, sued Transcom for sending him the e-mail, which he claimed broke antispam laws. He was also awarded legal costs of £616.66.

His case is the first in which a British court has set the level of compensation for spam. An estimated seven billion junk e-mails are sent worldwide each month and it is believed that spam accounts for three quarters of the e-mails that are sent in Britain.

More than a third of top companies fail to abide by the antispamming law, which gives customers the chance to opt out of unwanted e-mails.

Mr Dick said: “The courts have shown they are sensitive to putting right these misdemeanours, and the small claims procedures are ideally suited to take low-cost legal action.” He claimed that Transcom, based in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, had breached the Data Protection Act and the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations. The Data Protection Act covers the unlawful obtaining of an e-mail address, while the regulations cover the damage caused by the sending of the junk message.

Mr Dick told Edinburgh Sheriff Court that his e-mail address had been “harvested” by Transcom from an e-mail group of which he was a member. The message he received had been sent to 72,000 people.

He sued for the maximum amount allowed in a sheriff court, the equivalent of the small claims court in England.

Mr Dick, 30, an electronic marketing specialist, said: “When I contacted them they told me to sue them, so I did. They tried to argue to belittle the impact that an e-mail can have, but the sheriff was having none of it.”

He told The Times that the address Transcom used had only been used to sign up to the mailing list and had never received junk mail before. “Most spam comes from abroad and there is nothing much I can do about that, but we cannot throw stones at other countries unless we tackle the problem here,” he said.

Mr Dick has set up a website, scotchspam.org.uk, that advises other computer users how to seek a claim for damages. “The courts have now sent a clear message, spam will not be tolerated and individuals’ rights to not have their mailbox filled with unsolicited advertising will be upheld,” he said.

“It has been clear to me throughout my case and in front of each sheriff that they have little time for spammers and their antisocial actions.”

Transcom, which specialises in satellite communication and military customers, said that it had offered an out-of-court settlement of £750. It was not present at the final hearing.

William Smith, a company director, told the magazine OutLaw that Mr Dick’s address had appeared on its files as a customer after the company was placed on the e-mail group without its authorisation. “Every year we send out a mail with our special offer to customers and to people who have contacted the business about our services. In the the years we have done that we have had only one complaint, and that was from Gordon Dick,” he said. “The mail has everything it should — a button saying unsubscribe. It says if you do not want to receive this, let us know . . . but Mr Dick didn’t do any of that.”

In 2005 a compensation claim for spam ended in an out-of-court payment of £270 plus £30 costs. Nigel Roberts, 37, who runs an internet company in the Channel Islands, sued after receiving unwanted e-mails for a car company and a fax broadcasting business.

Billions sent every month

— An e-mail is defined as spam if it is both unsolicited and sent in bulk

— Spam accounts for more than three quarters of all e-mails in Europe, North America and Australasia

— Britain is the fourth most prolific spam originator, after the US, China and Russia

— Spam e-mails cost the British economy £1.3 billion a year

Source: Spamhaus, European Commission and APACS

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