? Junk email which is usually unsolicited ? sending a mass of emails from commercial sites to people who haven't ask for the email and also emails sent to annoy or harass the receiver which may include crashing their computer.

? Unsolicited email ? advertising a product and or service, which will overload the receiver's computer which will slow the computer down.

? The using of mailing lists ? to blanket online groups, private email boxes with indiscrimination, unsolicited messages of a promotional nature.

? An activity ? that tricks search engines into giving their site a higher ranking on searches via hiding keywords and submitting webpage's daily to the search engine.

? Ian an inappropriate attempt to ? send emails and use emails to send the same email message to numerous people who didn't ask for the information as well as other network communications.

Spam emails has got worse over the last few years in 2001 only 8% of emails sent worldwide were spam at the end of this year 2007 50% of all emails sent will be spam. If you have a company website this is likely to get worse, as spam emails will come through your business email address.

Spam cannot only cause you the inconvenience in having to delete them all, it can crash your computer, overload your email account stopping you from receiving and sending other emails but also time and money lost. Money can be lost by stopping you from receiving important emails and also by the time colleagues spend deleting and filtering spam emails, which will stop them from doing their normal job. Worms and viruses may also be included in spam emails, which can destroy data and your system information

There are ways of filtering spam emails with the use of anti spam software and spam filtering software. There are free packages available on the Internet to help you protect your home computer and your email accounts but if you are a business looking for anti spam and spam filtering software your best bet is to look into the many companies selling specially designed packages for businesses.

There isn't a complete cure for spam but anti spam and spam-filtering software can help your spam emails reduce but you will always get a few that filter through to your inbox. There are other ways to minimize your spam including: -

? Don't use your personal email account when you sign up to newsgroups, forums, mailing lists etc.

? Use web filters to filter out your spam.

? Don't click on any links that are in spam emails, don't give them any of your personal information and don't buy anything from them.

? If you have a website remove your email address from the website, this can be done by using a form to do with validation.