But above and beyond the smaller issue of filling up your inbox, spam email is also very time consuming and there can be nothing worse than sitting down at your PC and having to spend 10, 20 or even 30 minutes sifting through all of the junk email in order to get to the genuine messages. Not to mention the risk you run of accidentally deleting a genuine email because you start to hurry or lose concentration.

So what steps can you take to rid yourself (or at the very least minimise) this simply horrible invasion? Quite simple really (and you will kick yourself as to why you didn’t think of it before). You need to install some anti-spam software. Easy to install, you just configure the anti-spam software and leave it to run and before you know it, the proliferation of spam in your inbox is almost completely nullified.

Firstly, consider the purpose of anti-spam software. Anti-spam software filters all incoming email and then scans each email searching for certain key words, addresses and traits. It detects if indeed the email is spam and then quarantines the offending email message into its own folder, sometimes identified as a Junk or Spam folder in your email program.

Generally anti-spam software has a pre-configured profile that it looks for in order to identify the spam email, however with some programs on offer they do allow you to also customize this configuration if you have certain emails you want quarantined.

There are a number of anti-spam software programs available for free which allow you to try before you buy. But before you starting downloading any applications, you might want to think about the features that match your specific needs.

For example, in any anti-spam software you will be looking for a program that offers you almost 100% filtering. While this can be difficult because of the sheer number of spammers out there, using a program that offers free updates is important, as the anti-spam software vendors are constantly updating their products in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the offenders.

Some of the other features that you might be looking for in any anti-spam software include programs that block email addresses or specific text in a subject line or body of the email. You might want a program that allows you to set up custom filters so that you can capture specific spam that has been hitting your inbox for sometime or white-list so that you can nominate who you want to receive emails from. This can be tricky as you need to remember to add any new contacts to your network; however, many PC users find this more reassuring.