Email was designed for the use of the very few people who were the original users of the Internet - a handful of academics and scientists. It worked well. The protocol was simple and very scalable.

There was, however, a serious weakness - security. The people who developed email probably never envisioned that the Internet would become as large as it now is.

With growth came bad guys.

Unscrupulous marketers quickly realized that they could now distribute their message to hundreds of thousands of recipients extremely cheaply.

In order for this to work, the bad guys needed email addresses - and lots of them.

Special bots were developed which would spider the web looking for email addresses on websites and discussion boards. Large ISP's and Internet merchants were approached with offers to purchase all the email addresses they had on file. Mailing list operators were approached. 

Now, there are even more sophisticated ways to harvest email addresses, Directory Harvest Attacks are waged on large ISP's. Sophisticated computer programs generate random email addresses. Emails are sent to these addresses, and if nothing bounces back, then it's assumed to be a valid email address and added to the list, which is then sold or traded.

This explains why within 15 minutes of signing up with a large service provider you will already have spam emails waiting for you.

Viruses have been developed and distributed which comb through the infected computer's address book to find valid emails - which are then forwarded to a central location. Some viruses, themselves, even send spam.

Sometimes, even honest businessmen are duped into spamming with promises that the emails on a list are all "opt-in".

Ever wonder where all this spam comes from? The majority comes from Eastern Europe. Much of it is controlled by the Russian Mafia and other Eastern Europe gangsters.

At this point, you may be saying to yourself - "this is all very interesting, but what can I do about it?"

We agree. Enough of the problem - let's move onto the solutions.