Spam increased by 13% in 2005, and average spam levels in 2006 will remain at 2005s level of 85% of all email traffic according to spam filtering specialist SoftScan. (http://www.softscan.co.uk)

Imagine the above statistic of 85% is your inbox. You have been away for the weekend and upon your return, you decide to check your Inbox to see if you've got any important messages you need to deal with (and to see if your friends have sent you any funny pictures of course). Your Inbox total reads 100 unread messages. Wow, you sure are popular lately! It's only been a couple of days.

You open your Inbox and are immediately downcast as you trawl through the mass of spam (unsolicited) emails. Out of 100 messages only 15 will be what we call 'real' mail. Of course this is assuming you don't have any spam filtering service, either with your ISP / Mailhost or on your email client.

The advent of ISP's and the like using spam filters and automatic virus checkers has certainly made a huge impact on the amount we no longer receive in our inboxes, but these are not infallible. Quite often the people who send spam find ways to circumvent the filters, or legitimate mail ends up in the spam/bulk email folders and you have to wade through it all anyway.

Ways in which to stop spam:

• Use email filtering, on your own computer as well as your ISPs.
• Only give out your email address to friends, relatives and trusted colleagues. Use web based email for anything else. Be aware though, that a lot of web based email services such as msn and yahoo are used by spammers and as such some websites do not accept registrations from these.
• If you send an email to all your friends, don't put them all in to the 'to' field, use Bcc.
• Make sure your email software is set to not show images and disable HTML mail, use plain text instead.
• Don't forget to run anti-spyware programmes regularly.
• If you join a website or forum, only use those who give you the option to hide your email address.
• Don't click the opt out link in an email, if it is from a reputable site, go to the site and search for their opt out link that way. If it is spam, all it will do it verify your email address as valid.
• Report spam to the senders ISP.

How to deal with the stress of spam:

It is very annoying, time consuming and stressful having to deal with all that spam. It takes time out of your day where you could be doing something useful, or not. So how do you keep yourself from getting too stressed whilst wading through it all?

That is a question I can't answer, as we all respond to and deal with stress differently. I can however tell you how I have managed to actually find time to laugh at the vast amounts of spam I receive.

After sending any spam that dared to invade my Inbox to the spam folder, I then go into the spam folder to check for legitimate mail. Once that's done, I take a minute to look at the senders name on all the spam. These are automated random names, designed to look as though they are from real addresses/people, but I find some of them humourous and look through to find the funniest. It only takes a couple of minutes, but laughing at it takes the stress away from having it at all, and then I can get on with the rest of my time online relaxed. Don't let spam bother you, deal with it, laugh at it and then forget it.