Spam is such a part of everyday life for most internet and email users that it's easy to forget why it's being produced at all. Thinking about it, it seems rather strange that anyone bothers making spam. It is almost universally hated, and you have never bought anything from a seller who sent you a spam email. So why spam?

When advertising was limited to other means, such as post, telemarketing, billboards, and television and printed advertisements, the cost per individual targeted was relatively high. A prime-time television advert costs about a penny per viewer; a full-page colour advertisement in a good magazine costs about half a penny. Direct mail is the most expensive, costing at least 24p per targeted individual. Clearly, spamming people via junk snail-mail would be a very expensive business. You would need to rely on a good proportion of people actually responding to your mail shots, which is why junk email, whilst irritating, tends to be targeted reasonably well (although, at the age of twelve, receiving a mail shot suggesting I buy support stockings was somewhat surprising).

However, spamming via email (or message boards, blogs and other online media) is incredibly cheap. Individual emails cost somewhere in the hundredths of a penny when a spamming company is used to organise spam emails, and a good hacker can set up a spam network themselves for even less. Really marginal products can be marketed this way because although the take-up from spam emails is extremely low, you can send thousands of them at very little cost, meaning that it won't take long to make a profit.

Of course, the cost to recipients is much higher. There are literal costs: spam clogs up infrastructure, eats up data transfer quotas, and takes up time for employees forced to filter out the emails they actually want, sometimes missing important ones in the process. Software must be bought, and anti-spam research must be done. Sometimes email addresses have to be changed because spam is becoming overwhelming, and this can cost companies time and money, telling clients and partners that email addresses have changed. But there are also less tangible costs: spam is a serious source of annoyance for many people, and filters can lead to legitimate emails being lost.

Various spam solutions have been proposed. Spam filters are one of the methods being employed, but of course, every time developers find a way to block spam, a new sort of spam is invented, and the cycle continues. Nevertheless, filters are getting better, and this is something of a success story: speaking from personal experience, the filter on my web-mail account is so good that in my three years of using it, I have only ever had four spam emails in my inbox. All the rest (and I receive about 500 a month) end up safely in the spam folder, where I need never look at them (except occasionally to read the amusing titles). The better filters are, the more "expensive" spamming becomes, as slimmer and slimmer proportions of spam recipients actually see the emails. Blacklists are a waste of time, as spam emails usually appear to email software to have come from random and unique email addresses; whitelists (in which the user specifies addresses from which emails should be accepted) are very effective, but the disadvantage is that many legitimate emails from new contacts are likely to be filtered out.

Other suggested solutions literally increase the cost of spamming. One possibility is imposing small charges for sending emails. The charges would be tiny enough that normal usage would be very inexpensive, but sending thousands of emails at once would pile up the expense. Penalising legitimate email users seems unreasonable, however. Another suggestion is to only charge for sending huge quantities of emails simultaneously. One clever idea is to make sending emails take slightly more computational power, so that sending one or two emails is not a problem, but sending thousands will slow up one's computer intolerably. Solutions like these would involve altering the very infrastructure of the internet, however, so they are likely to remain pipe dreams for some time.

Anti-spam laws are also being implemented, and several convictions have taken place. However, catching and prosecuting spammers is difficult, expensive and time-consuming, and the laws are unlikely to make much of a dent in the army of spammers sending unwanted emails every day.

Of course, you personally can better protect yourself against spam in a number of ways. Don't contribute to spammers' profits: never buy from spammers, and don't visit their websites, as they can profit from pay-per-click ads which don't even involve making a sale. If possible, don't even open a spam email, especially if it has an attachment. Some spammers have set up systems whereby a tiny image is embedded in the email, held on a distant website; when your email client retrieves the image, the spammer is notified that your email address is an active one, and you may find yourself the victim of yet more spam.

You can also avoid getting spammed by looking after your email addresses, particularly the ones you care about. If you must sign up to things on the internet, use an address you don't mind getting spammed, and keep another one strictly friends-only. Avoid posting your address on the internet; spammers use software which automatically crawls websites looking for email addresses. If you need to post an address, you can avoid spammers by finding imaginative ways of spelling out your email address. Unfortunately, a lot of spammers' spiders are wise to using "at" in place of "@", or email addresses with extra spaces added. There is also this free Xona email address encrypting program, which allows you to have clickable mailto email addresses on your website which will be invisible to the majority of spammers' harvesting programs.

Protect others from spam too: if you're forwarding a chain email, shame on you anyway, but make sure that you delete the top part of the email with all the email addresses of other unfortunate recipients when you send it on. It will only take one of these emails to fall into the hands of a spammer for thousands of innocents' email addresses to end up getting spammed. Also, ignore emails which say that such-and-such a friend wants you to see a page, but you can only see it if you fill in ten of your friends' email addresses; the jokes are usually rubbish, and you will be signing your friends up to more spam.

Keeping up with the best ways to avoid spam is challenging, but it is worth doing your bit; the less attention spammers get, the less profitable spamming becomes. We should do everything we can to curb the tide of spam, as, however good spam filtering gets, the sheer volume of junk hurtling around the internet will slow things up for everyone.

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