The worst part of this situation is that spammers are very clever people and they are using all of their knowledge to get their message onto our desktops whether we want it or not.

For example, this week hidden among all of my usual get-rich quick schemes and penis enlargement information was an email from a porn site that literally took control of my desktop.

As soon as email message was highlighted in my Outlook Express window, it launched a web page that took up entire screen of my computer.

There it was on my 21" monitor, for whole world to see it if they were looking over my shoulder, a lusty, busty women crouched on her knees with her arms pressing together her breasts to overly exaggerate obvious and her legs spread so far apart you could see her most intimate body parts in all of their powder pink glory.

I am a man with a healthy love for women but I do not appreciate having this sort of thing forced on me because someone wants me to give them my money in exchange for pornographic pictures.

As far as I am concerned, these are "Terroristic Tactics".

My computer and I were held hostage by use of HTML source code that includes script language that launches a window to view their web page.

Worse still, window is one that takes up entire computer screen and does not have usual buttons on upper right hand corner to minimize or close window.

And, it might even include command to keep popping open even more windows on your desktop at set intervals that can literally freeze up your computer!

What can you do to fight back?

Whether this problem occurs via reading your email or if you are trapped into it while visiting a web site, there are a few things you can do short of ripping power cord out of wall.

First of all, Federal Trade Commission, FTC, http://www.ftc.gov/, takes a very dim view of anyone that tries to force you to view any material you do not wish to view, be it advertising or pornography.

In a recent action by Federal Trade Commission, they

I have had it with this nonsense. Looking at email addresses, it was obvious that mine were being harvested from web.

There is software, similar to protocol used by search engines, that allows someone to enter keywords, and it will search web for any web site that matches keywords entered. It will then capture any email addresses it finds. An example of such software is "Atomic Harvester".

I downloaded this software, which is fully functional in its search capabilities, and is free if that is all you want. You cannot however, save addresses it finds unless you pay for it. Not wishing to harvest any addresses from web, I chose free version, as step one of my devious plan, so I could see what spamsters would find when they harvest my site.

Step two was a bit more work. Instead of simply deleting spam, I created a filter with my email reader that automatically sends all spam identified to my trash bin. I use Eudora, which makes this a rather easy task, but was still time consuming. While this won't provide a "spam free" inbox, it will cut down on junk one has to wade through. The rest I simply delete, which also goes to trash bin.

Now, I have all this spam in once place - my trash bin. But wait, I said get even. A good friend of mine is proficient in "Perl" programming language. He wrote a program that goes into my trash bin, and extracts all of "From" email addresses it finds. Now I have a file of all return addresses of anyone who sends me spam.