Increase in Junk emails

[WendyS]

In recent weeks I have started to become innundated with junk mail, as have many other acquaintences of mine. Is this a sinister plot to cause global email systems to become unmanageable? And can anything be done about it? I ask all my contacts to make me a Bcc recipient and to delete the sender's address before forwarding jokes, etc. but I suspect that once your email address is in the public domain there is little that can be done about it..

[LeMarchand]

Apparently there are 2 main causes at the moment:

There is a trojan doing the rounds that uses infected machines as spam servers and the mails are sent as pictures, so that anti-spam programs don't pick up key words like "Viagra", "buy stocks" etc etc.

I've noticed that most of the spam I get is to addresses that can't be hard to find online,