Spammers are the scum of the earth. They have no scruples whatsoever.

I couldn't begin to tell you how many hosting orders we've received which turned out to be spammers using a stolen credit card and identity to sign up with us.

Perhaps the most unscrupulous thing they do is send email out under other peoples names.

You may have, from time to time, received bounce messages for emails you never sent. Ever wonder how that happens? Is someone using your email account on A1 Web Server to send emails?

You can breathe easy on that point. Unless a spammer has somehow discovered your password, they are not sending emails through your account.

What happens is this:

Spammers write viruses which end up infecting several hundred computers. All of those computers end up sending out spam. They have to make that spam appear to be coming from someone, so the virus selects one of the names in the address book and pretends to be that person. This is called spoofing, and is one of the major security holes in the email protocol.

Now - suppose one of these viruses infects a friend's computer, or maybe a business associate. Suppose, even further, that the virus selects your email address to use in the FROM field for several hundred thousands of email.

If that were to happen, a certain number of those emails would be undeliverable. They get bounced back to the sender.

Since the virus made it appear that you were the sender, even though you weren't, all those undeliverable messages get bounced back to you.

Sometimes, the number of bounces is so tremendous that your email account becomes almost unusable. It's impossible to wade through all of that spam.

If this happens to you, you basically have three options:

Option 1 - Ride out the storm. Eventually, in several weeks, the bounce messages will start dwindling down. At that point you can start using your email account again.

Option 2 - Use the filtering features in Outlook Express to filter out any emails which contain the words "undeliverable", "postmaster", "bounced", or "mailer-daemon". A very good tutorial for setting up Outlook Express filters may be found HERE.

Option 3 - The best solution, by far, is to sign up for a Postini account. Postini is able to filter all these emails out before they ever reach your inbox. We are a Postini reseller, and would be happy to set you up.