The Swedish government tabled a draft law that would allow it to to crack down on people who flood email inboxes with unwanted advertisements, so-called spam.

After reaching an agreement with the Leftist party, the Socialist-Democratic government proposed changing the country's advertising law, allowing it to issue fines of up to five million kronor (673,000 dollars, 558,000 euros) to spammers. "With the new proposals, consumers will receive fewer so-called junk mails in their email," Consumer Minister Ann-Christin Nykvist said in a statement Thursday. "Lately, the number of unrequested email advertising messages has dramatically increased, bothering large numbers of email users." "The huge amounts of spam hog employee attention, take up expensive storage space on servers, and cause great irritation," Thomas Vernersson, president of Swedish data storage company Northern, told AFP Thursday, adding that about half of all email that lands in Swedish inboxes was unsolicited spam. According to technology research firm IDC, the global daily volume of email messages is set to grow from 9.7 billion in 2000 to more than 35 billion in 2005. The definition of email will also be extended to include text messages on mobile phones.