Junk e-mail costs UK business millions of pounds a week in wasted time yet the government seems to be making little or no progress towards making it illegal. Both the EU and US have drafted up laws but experts say none go far enough to prosecuting the sources of spam.

Spam e-mails can be anything from saying you have a free university diploma, an approved loan or cheap viagra. E-mails like this are very cheap to send and normally cost the receiver more in time then the sender.

Similar annoyances through mail and telemarketing have strict guidelines as to what can or cannot be marketed and in what quantities but there are no laws or guidelines for e-mails. This is why your 12 year old child can be getting emails about extending body parts. There is currently no law against this which for many organisations and people is outrageous.

One organisation against fighting spam is CAUCE - The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (here). They are primarily based in the US but have ties around the world to help stop spam. While they recognise that a large proportion of spam comes from the US but not all, is why legislation around the world needs to be put into place to stop spam.

Some corporations have taken an active role in trying to stop junk e-mail, one being Microsoft who have pledged to fight spammers. Microsoft have come up with various ideas, one being reported by ImAFish's Jonnie Ashley which suggests emails use a similar system to normal mail.

Until governments take an active role in fighting spam by making it illegal the option left to users involve filtering out junk mail. There are various programs about some are dedicated mail filters and some are built into mail clients.

One program is Mozilla Thunderbird (here) which has a built in junk mail filter which normally gets about 90% of spam. For the emails the Junk mail filter does not get you can set-up separate filters for words such as vi@gra and phrases such as ?approved credit card?.

Microsoft Outlook users can also configure their program to filter out junk email. Microsoft also provide a list of commonly used words in spam messages, these can be seen at here.

Programs such as Mail Washer (here) are also good at stopping junk email from reaching your in-box. However they are not always free and you often have to pay for the best features. .

Virus's are also a big program for e-mails, one of the fastest ways that virus's spread are through e-mail which is why a good e-mail client is useful for filtering out virus's.