"If you are reading this, whatever you wish for will come true." "Do not stop once you begin reading this or you will face bad luck for the next seven days." "This is no joke, XYZ company is offering a 1000 dollars to all those who forward this message."

How many times have you come across such clichéd lines while browsing your e-mail? Maybe a hundred by now, but this phenomenon is not slowing down so you can expect a few hundred more by the end of this year.

Spam’s growth has been unstoppable, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of all mail. It is no longer a surprise to find out that the new e-mail blinking on your inbox is not from a best friend but a spam from some company you have never even heard of.
So who is the villain behind this scheme? Unfortunately there isn't just one. Many "spammers" are generating money out of this practice and we, by forwarding their e-mails, are making it easier for them.

Spammers use various techniques to get your e-mail addresses like robot scanning web pages and harvesting programmes that scour the Internet and copy any text that contains the @ character. The e-mails they send to the extracted e-mail addresses then produce chain e-mails which gather even more e-mail addresses as they are passed along.

It gets pretty frustrating – deleting loads of junk e-mail becomes a chore you have to do every single day, and before going to bed at night! To make it worse, I sometimes mistakenly end up deleting e-mails from genuine people and companies I am somehow linked with.

This message, therefore, is for the genius who came up with the idea of spam messages – we wave the white flag and are ready to surrender. We admit that we have lost the war on junk e-mail with you. Are you happy now? Maybe you should now come up with an idea to stop the spamming. That'd be great!

As a matter of fact, I would have written this sooner, but I was too busy blocking senders and deleting the spam from my e-mail programme.

Sadaf Hassan, age 19