Take your revenge on the unruly spambots

Actually, don't bother because, as those of you whose brains run at gigahertz speed will have realised, the address is fake and there's not much point responding to any spam that lands in your inbox. Even if you find a working address in the message, your reply would be doing the spammer a favour because he or she would then know for sure your account was live and would then inundate your inbox with garbage.

Instead, like a sexual desperado who pursues anything with a pulse, the spammer has trawled the internet for e-mail addresses using a virtual device neatly known as a 'spambot'. A software program that browses websites looking for e-mail addresses, a spambot 'harvests' and collects the information into lists. They are then either directly exploited for marketing purposes, or sold - often in the form of CD-Roms crammed with millions of addresses.

An example of the phenomenon is the US$179 Atomic Harvester: a piece of software that combs the internet around the clock, gathering addresses it encounters on bulletin boards and directories.

Pitched shamelessly as 'the most powerful e-mail collection software on the Net', it will supposedly hoover up thousands of e-mail addresses an hour.

Amusingly, if you want to download the demo, you must enter your e-mail address: 'Be sure to use your real one,' you are told, which sounds about as wise as asking a convicted child molester to babysit for you.