By PETER GRIFFIN

Captain Bob could be any teenage school-leaver, filling in the gap before university and a job in some computer-related field.

But the 19-year-old is possibly New Zealand's biggest spam-artist.

From his Mt Eden bedroom he sends unsolicited spam emails across the world by the million.

Captain Bob makes a living sending spam to addresses his business partners strip from the web - direct marketing from hell, you could say.

The gatherer of the addresses, a company with joint American and Russian ownership, uses software to "harvest" email addresses across the internet - from websites, mailing lists and email databases.

Programs are also available to randomly generate email addresses that have well-known domain name suffixes.

Addresses starting with info@, webmaster@ or sales@, followed by the domain, are obvious targets.

Known as a "dictionary attack" a spammer will connect to a mail server, bombarding it with a sequence of letters and numbers.

Sequences found to be active addresses are added to the spammers' list.

With millions of reserved addresses, the free email suppliers such as Hotmail, Yahoo and MSN are key targets, but Captain Bob says he generally steers away from them as the quality of leads generated is poor.

It is also his job to sort through the replies the emails trigger.

Filtering software makes the task easier, removing junk replies by targeting the abusive words that often appear in the messages of annoyed recipients.

From a million sent messages, Captain Bob says between 2000 and 3000 will respond asking to be removed from the mailing list.

"And I do remove them. Everyone who replies goes on the remove list," he says.

The process sees Captain Bob left with 150 to 200 genuine sales leads from interested people. A minuscule success rate, but enough to justify his fee - and to keep the spamming industry humming along.

The overheads are minimal. Captain Bob pays about $300 a month to maintain his server. He runs a Jetstart account ($65) to connect to his server which in turn connects to a high-capacity pipe out to the web.

He is paid US$300 ($577) for every million emails he sends, regardless of the response rate. His aim is to clear $1200 a day, working just a few days a month.

The money arrives through PayPal, the electronic transaction system.