Email is a powerful means of communication but it's power is often exploited by spammers. Estimates vary but much of the email traffic on the internet is spam. We have spam and virus filtering software on our mailserver which probably rejects or filters 75% of the emails we receive. Dealing with this unsolicited mail is a huge potential drain on productivity.

Many email clients now provide intelligent 'Junk' filtering: once you mark an email as junk or spam, the system will, in future, regard all similar messages as spam and direct it to a separate folder. All you need to do is check the folder from time to time to ensure that there is no legitmate email ('ham') that has been classified as spam incorrectly and mark any spam in your inbox as junk; over time the volume of spam in your inbox will reduce markedly.

Organisations with their own mailserver, can ensure that much of the spam and virus carrying emails are dealt with before they get to users' PC's.

Email clients with spam/junk filtering

• Mozilla-Thunderbird: http://www.nidelven-it.no/articles/introduction_to_thunderbird_5
• Mac OSX Mail: See 'Help' in the application
• Evolution: http://www.novell.com/documentation/nld/index.html
• Some recent versions of MS Outlook: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP052429671033.aspx