One of the most hideous corruptions of what is probably one of the coolest things ever invented is what has become to be termed "Spam Email." In the broadest sense spam is anything you don't want to receive, but most of it seems to consist of ads to make your body parts larger, refinance your home, or all manner of pornography.

So, the first question is, how did they get my email? A few of the spammer's favorite sources for email addresses are from registration at unscrupulous sites, (think sweepstakes) news group postings, chat sessions, spam bots that crawl the web harvesting email addresses (think personal websites) and email lists that spammers purchase.

There are spam filters that work pretty well, but you should keep in mind a few things. There are no perfect filters and every one of them has a certain percentage of "false positives" (legitimate email that gets blocked) and "false negatives," (spam email that gets through)

If you're still itching to block the spam here are some options that you can try. The top rated programs according to the February 2003 issue of PC Magazine are Spam Assassin Pro http://www.deersoft.com $29.95 and Spam Killer http://www.spamkiller.com $39.95