George Keane's inbox was steadily filling up with the usual junk mail yesterday. Although George, who lives in London, is only 12, the emails were promoting everything from interest-free loans to penis enlargement treatments and hardcore pornography.

Among the more printable offers were "Watch these sloppy teen girls get it all over" and "Watch her do anything and everything live 4 U".

"They normally come between five and 10 in the evening, so when I get home from school it isn't too bad," he said. "By bedtime there are at least 30, and if I leave it for as long as a week there can be as many as 300 in my inbox.

"That can be really annoying, as the inbox goes over the allowed limit and the email account gets disabled until some of the messages are deleted.

"This stops the emails I actually want to receive from getting through.

"I really don't know why they send them, as I never read any of the junk mail that I get. It isn't anything very interesting. It is either really disgusting or advertising mortgages and things.

"Sometimes it can be very confusing when you get an email from a named person with a subject like 'Have you lost your keys?' or 'Hi, how are you?'.

"It makes you think it's someone you might know, and so you open it and it just turns out to be advertising. Once you have opened those then loads of other boxes pop up advertising other things. It takes ages to shut them all down.

"It started from the beginning when I set up the account but the more websites I have visited the more junk mail I have got.

"I had another account before this one but I went on holiday for two weeks and when I got back it was so overloaded that it had shut down totally.

"I think it is really bad, because people who are even younger than me might get some of these kinds of messages and open them without really realising what is going to appear.

"When I log on I don't even bother reading the subject headings properly any more. I just delete them. It can take up to 10 minutes to delete 20 messages, as they are often big files.

"The problem is that it isn't as simple as just changing your address, because then you have to tell everyone you know, and at the end of the day it will just start happening all over again. So what's the point?"