Email spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE). I know, just when you thought this was atechnical article about America’s favorite luncheon meat.

Unsolicited means that you lack affirmative consent from the recipient. If you found an address on a web page, on a mailing list, or on Usenet, you don't have consent. If you got an address in gift, sale or trade, you don't have consent. If someone gave you an address for a particular purpose (for example, a commercial transaction, information about your products, or after-sales support) you only have consent to use it for that particular purpose. Use for any other purpose requires a new consent.

Bulk means that you sent a substantively similar message to more than 200 addresses a day. A message that differs from recipient to recipient only by details (e.g. the recipient's name, account number, blocks of random words, characters, numbers, or non-rendered text) is the same message. A message that uses different wording to express the same idea is the same message. If you send the same message to 200 different people day after day, it's spam.

OK, Now you know, but what can you do about all those insurance solicitations, Viagra ads, Russian women that want to marry you, breast enhancement ads, etc. They run the gambit. Most good email clients (not Outlook Express) have decent SPAM email filters systems that you can easily train to recognize what is not SPAM and what is SPAM. Eudora is an excellent example of a robust, mature and feature rich email client. It comes in three versions and two are free. It is made by Qualcomm. It has a very easy to use “Junk Mail” filter tool from SpamWatch.

Norton Internet Security has a module to deal with SPAM in the event you have a featureless email client like Outlook Express. Norton AntiSpam uses a pattern-matching engine that automatically compares the contents of incoming email messages to a list of spam characteristics. If the message contains many spam characteristics, it is more likely to be spam than a message that contains few spam characteristics. Based on this analysis, Norton AntiSpam estimates the likelihood that the message is spam. This is similar to the manner SpamWatch in Eudora works. Most of this type of SPAM tool can be trained.

SPAM has become so bad, that some Security software makers like Symantec/Norton have websites dedicated to dealing with the problem......http://www.symantec.com/spamwatch/.

Last, but not least, and only a tease.......is spoofing. You may have seen email from your own address that you know you did not send or you may have sent email to a friend to find that your address is blocked. Chances are that your email address has been “Spoofed.