A postal worker who was caught with more than 33,000 pornographic pictures of children, including babies, on his computer system, has been jailed for 21 months.
At Exeter Crown Court Judge Jeremy Griggs said the pictures were some of the worst he had seen.
In the raid on Steven Melhuish's home in Teignmouth, police not only seized the pictures, but 91 movie clips and 104 documents containing graphic child porn stories.
Prosecutor Peter Ashman said Melhuish was caught when the FBI handed his details to British police as one of the clients of the Landslide Productions porn empire in America.
The images were found on two computers, floppy discs and cds discovered at the home he shared with his elderly parents. When he was interviewed Melhuish admitted that he had regularly accessed child porn sites and records revealed that he had made over 3,000 visits.
He said it started out as curiosity and he then claimed that he was planning to identify the victims and set up a website to expose the paedophiles behind the racket.
Sarah Leasing, defending, said that assertion was no longer relied on by the defence. She said Melhuish had worked for the Royal Mail for 23 years but had been sacked when these offences came to light. He had brought great shame on his family, but he had not been involved in commercial gain. He had just viewed the images in his own room.
Melhuish, of Fourth Avenue, Teignmouth, pleaded guilty to 23 specimen charges of making indecent pictures of children.
In addition to the prison term, Melhuish was made the subject of an extended licence period of three years so he can attend a sex offenders rehabilitation programme. He was also put on the Sex Offenders Register for 10 years and banned from having unsupervised access to children under the age of 16.
Passing sentence Judge Griggs said the aggravating feature of this case was the extremely young age of some of the children. He said 10 per cent of the images fell into the worst category.