Hands up who's fed up of being sold things they don't want in their inbox every day! It's even more irritating than being served in a greasy spoon cafe packed with chanting Vikings.

There is no easy answer, but these tips should stem the flow of spam - aka unwanted email.

Preventative measures

1. If you have to give your email address to a website, use a different one to your regular account. We have several different email accounts for this purpose. If some unscrupulous marketer should then add it to their list, you can cancel the account with little harm done.

2. Try not to get into the habit of using cc: in the headers of emails to forward virus warnings or other spurious chain emails to large groups of friends. They may look helpful but are often sent out by spammers who want to harvest email addresses. Two websites which will help you check to see if what you're about to forward is really true are listed below. We really recommend you use them before selecting everybody in your address book.

Break The Chain
Visit Snopes, which is actually a very entertaining site and worth a look whether you're researching a spurious email or not - it even debunks the myth that Coca-cola decided which colours Santa Claus would wear!

• Some cheeky spammers use software that collects email addresses from websites. There are ways to hide your address from such software using Javascript or you can write it out such as rachel at rechord dot com, which to date fools the robots.

Cures
• If you want to join the throngs of spam vigilantes, register with Spam Cop and report any naughty emails to them. They will investigate and report the originator to the relevant authorities so that they can't plague you, or anyone else, any more.

• There is also a project on the boil called Okopipi which aims to turn the tables on the spammers by sending the companies advertised by spam an email for every junk mail they send out. All perfectly legal, but vengeful enough to be rather satisfying!

© Rachel Collinson at Rechord.com