Chances are you've used email once or twice in your life. Until now, your primary method of retrieving mail might have been a web client. That's a perfectly acceptable, if not thoroughly boring, solution. Might we then suggest the raw power of the Mail client.

When someone famous and popular, like Michael Jackson, dies, most of us are interested in the developments. Emails fly and news and celebrity sites jump into high gear. Now spammers are taking advantage of that interest by sending emails complete with attached viruses that claim information about a celebrity death.

Stacy Reed explains how to use GuerrillaMail, a site that provides its visitors with

disposable email addresses

that expire within an hour's time. This service is ideal for situations where you need to sign up for a service you only plan to use once, so you can avoid the subsequent spam as well as the headache of having to unsubscribe later.

An alternative to all the things we've mentioned is

using a service to de-spam your email

. These services do all the filtering and you get an inbox that's much cleaner.

Unlike filters or plug-in,

challenge and response systems

work off a different premise. The key is that you have certain people you want to receive mail from. All other email senders have to prove themselves first.

We've already established that spam sucks so it stands to reason that there are a plethora of software suites,

plug-ins

and add-ons that purport to help you

deal with spam

. Michael "Doctor File Finder" Callahan highlights a few programs that help you to

squash spam

.

Most

email clients

have built in some form of

spam protection

. Most anti-virus programs also offer

spam filtering

. This protection is designed to "filter" out unwanted email. While it may not catch all

email spam

, it's a great first step and generally, the least intrusive method for dealing with spam and other junk email.

Spam

. Depending on your tastes it's a a) delicious or b) vile canned meat product from Hormel. If you're a computer user there is no a) / b) proposition; spam sucks. Michael "Doctor File Finder" explains

what exactly spam is

and how to eradicate or, at least, lessen its impact on your inbox. Spam is the plague of the Internet and nearly 90% of all the email that's sent is spam. We'll show you some ways to

reduce the amount of spam

you have to deal with.

Often times, spam emails contain a web address (URL) that the reader is expected to click on. This leads them to a place they didn't really want to go or offers them a download they don't really want. Now spammers are using shortened URLs, like those created by a number of online services, to hide their misdirection. As ever, the message is beware of URLs in your email and only click if you're sure you know what you're in for.

In the world of Internet security, there are the bad guys; the malware creators, the spyware makers, the hackers, spammers and so on. Fortunately for legitimate online users, there are also the good guys; the anti-virus makers, the anti-spyware makers and the people that patrol the Internet to keep it safe. Symantec is one such good guy and Sean Carruthers got the chance to see one of three of it's worldwide

Security Operations Centers

, working 24/7, 365 days a year to do the online detective work that keeps the Internet (and your personal information) safe.

Unknown to many users your BlackBerry has a

firewall

that you can enable. This can be used to

block unwanted SMS or MMS messages, PIN messages

, and more. At the same time you can elect to allow messages from your contacts. With the

BlackBerry firewall

, you can

stop spam SMS messages

from being delivered to your device.

Spammers and producers of malware never seem to take a vacation. They try to capitalize on every holiday including Mother's Day. McAfee and Symantec have both detected increases in the amount of Mother's Day spam. Some sites in particular seem to be the top offenders and can infect your Mom with spyware and viruses if you send your card from one of them. Here's how to protect yourself and your Mom!

About 90% of all email is unsolicited. The slang term for this email is "SPAM". SPAM is used to distribute viruses and spyware. Unsuspecting young people are prone to respond to SPAM messages and open the enticing attachments. Using a good SPAM filter will help reduce the problem.

McAfee has announced a noticeable increase in the amount of scam or spam email that contains the word "valentine." Playing on our softer side, some scam emails invite us to a Valentine's themed page and invite us to install software. Don't do it!

In this

10 part video tutorial on setting up and using Thunderbird as your email client

, Michael "Doctor File Finder" Callahan runs us through the basics of getting started with

Mozilla's email client

. We look at

how to add email accounts to Thunderbird

, including

how to add a Gmail account to Thunderbird

, dealing with

email privacy

,

managing spam in Thunderbird

and much more.