Robert Dirskovski, Head of Interactive Media at the Direct Mailing Association, told Rachel that it is a problem world-wide and there is little can be done about illegal communications but recipients may like to forward it to www.iwf.org.uk (the Internet Watch Foundation).

To stop junk marketing e-mails register on www.e-mps.org/en.

Listener Tony Green e-mailed:

"I use 'Spamassassin' to get rid of spam (spamassassin.taint.org). It runs checks on every mail I receive and compares them against many rules to decide if they're spam or not.

My email program then automatically deals with the spams appropriately. Spamassassin is mainly aimed at real computers, but there is a version available for Windows as well.

Even if people don't want to go as far as running Spamassassin, they should be able to set up filter rules on their email program to automatically delete a large proportion of what comes in without even seeing it.

There are a couple of things that people can do to actively help fighting the spam menace. First is to use SpamCop (spamcop.net) to report each one.

This generates complaints to the ISPs whose networks are being used and also helps other organisations build up blacklists of ISPs who won't do anything.

Many other ISPs now automatically bounce every email sent from blacklisted networks."