Workers in town get 9.7 spams per day. Scarborough is ranked 139th out of a total of 229 cities and towns surveyed – higher on the list than cities such as Newcastle and Bristol, according to research by internet security company MessageLabs.

But we lag way behind some towns – workers in Egham in Surrey receive a whopping 189 unwanted messages every working day and those in Alton Hampshire are hit an average of 167 times. Fareham, also in Hampshire, is the spammers’ least favourite target with staff there getting an average of just two a week.

Businessman Colin Ellis, of Colin Ellis Property Services, admits that spam emails have affected his business. He said: “We get thousands of them and we’re very careful not to open them now. On two occasions in the past viruses in spam have caused our system to crash – it can be very damaging to a business when the computers go down.”

He added that his company had now installed sophisticated anti-spam software to combat the spammers.

Further analysis by MessageLabs suggests that higher rates are borne by companies in the recreation, manufacturing and IT services sectors.

The recreation sector forms a significant part of Scarborough’s economy and may be more exposed to spam by the very nature of the business, as email addresses are often in the public domain.

Manufacturing businesses may often experience a high level of spam activity because the organisation size to the outside world seems large, but the number of workers who are connected to the internet with functional email addresses is much smaller. In this latter case, spammers often create fake email addresses by combining dictionaries of first and last names with the target domain name, and in targeting a large organisation they may believe they are likely to hit upon more correct email addresses by sending millions of emails via “botnets” – robot networks – under their control.

This type of attack may result in a company with a few hundred users being swamped by millions of spam messages each day, many of which are destined for email addresses that don’t exist, but which still have to be process by mail servers before they can be rejected. Infrastructure designed for a few hundred users may not be built to cope with this kind of load, and other problems can occur as a result.

Paul Smith, of Scarborough Mobility in Westborough, said: “We just to get a lot of spam but of late we haven’t experienced too many. We’ve got a fairly new computer system so that’s probably the reason.”