Demon's email service is getting "well beyond a joke" after punters complained that they've been plagued with problems since last week.

Said one reader: "At the moment we are on our 5th day of unreliable mail relay host access, on Friday we were unable to send any emails at all. To compound matters, it also looks like we are having problems with Internet access."

While email can be received infrequently, sending email is proving to be a real nightmare with correspondence unable to be sent for several hours at a time.

"This is getting beyond a joke," said one user. "You can't run a business this way."

Demon says it's been hit by a "large volume of unwanted mail caused by configuration problems with some of our customers' equipment...primarily open relays," a spokeswoman told us.

This has led to a massive increase of spam, which appears to be causing Demon problems. ®