With the Christmas approaching, you can’t help but notice your inbox getting clogged with offers of fake loans, Viagra and many other “hot” topics. Internet users all over the world spend a lot of time sorting the e-mails in their inboxes, while e-mail systems are overwhelmed trying to keep up with all the spam, commented Dan Druker, a vice president at Postini, the U.S. email security company.

Postini has detected 7 billion spam e-mails worldwide in November compared to 2.5 billion in June. While over the Ocean, in Britain, spam has risen by 50 percent in the last two months alone according to the information provided by the Internet security company SurfControl.

According to the security firm Marshal, the top sources of spam are the United States, China and Poland.

Experts blame this overwhelming amount of spam on computer programs that hijack millions of home computers to send e-mails, literally transforming the home computers into “zombies”.

Right now, spam costs firms about $1,000 a year per employee in lost productivity and higher computing bills, according to a research published last year.

Hand in hand with spam comes “phishing”. Hence, home computer users are asked to reveal their bank details, putting their entire savings at risk.

The easiest way to get through spam filters is to disguise the “keywords”, hence, for example, Viagra becomes V1`agra.

Anti-spam laws exist but they have had mixed results. In US the first conviction came last year, while in Britain no one has ever been convicted based on a law which exists since 2003.

Experts believe that spam filters and law won’t ever stop spam and phishing. It will stop when people will decide to stop buying sexual performance enhancers, diet pills or other “supplements”. Spammers use these quick fixes that appeal to a lot of people hence spam is not much of a computer problem, but a human mentality one.