Out of all of the emails that are received each year 70%-80% are spam. The amount of spam sent is ever growing with no signs of slowing down. In 1994 the First large-scale spam email was sent to 6000 newsgroups, reaching millions of people and today there are around 90 billion spam emails sent each day.

Most spam that is sent and received is commercial advertising for doubtful products and get-rich-quick schemes. We are now also seeing new trends in the spam nature. Political spam is one of these new trends, these political spam emails often attack political parties, sometimes even threatening parties or political practices. Even though in most cases these threats are empty, it is essential that the members of the law keep up-to-date with what is contained within these messages as they could possibly contain genuine threats or contain communication between terrorists.

Anti-spam Solutions is the other new trend in spam that we are starting to see. This is the most ironic form of spam mail that we have seen emerge as the very thing telling you to get rid of spam is a spam email. The people behind this new form of spam want to cash in on the negative publicity that is generated by spam. Although this type of spam is highly annoying it seems harmless, however the truth is that opening the attachments and or clicking on the links contained within these Anti-spam Solutions emails you could potentially be downloading a Trojan virus.

The most common types of spam emails are made up of Adult Content, Health, IT, Personal Finance and Education/Training. These types of spam make up 50% of all the spam emails that are sent, with Adult Content and Health being the top culprits.

Subject: best and cheap erection tool, Subject: Lose up to 19% weight. A new weight-loss is here – These are classic examples of what most of us end up seeing in our inbox’s everyday. To make matters worse Trojan viruses and Spyware is more than often sent to your email address along with the spam message.

The way spam is sent to you is your email address is harvested from places like WebPages, forums, chat rooms, etc that you are either signed up to or that you visit on a frequent occasion. Even if you have never posted on a chat room or forum, your details remain there, making it possible for spammers to get hold of them.

As well as various types of spam emails, spam also comes in other forms of media that can be found online. Websites, guestbook’s, forums and link spamming happens on a regular basis. Link spamming is when a normal link is manipulated to take you to a spammer’s site so that the site gains more hits and therefore increases the sites page rank. As well as this, links can be manipulated and placed on websites where the links tag looks innocent but when it is actually clicked it takes you to sites containing, for example adult content.