Webopedia defines spam as:

Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. However, if a long-lost brother finds your e-mail address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it's unsolicited. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.

In addition to wasting people's time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail. However, some online services have instituted policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers.

There is some debate about the source of the term, but the generally accepted version is that it comes from the Monty Python song, "Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam…" Like the song, spam is an endless repetition of worthless text. Another school of thought maintains that it comes from the computer group lab at the University of Southern California who gave it the name because it has many of the same characteristics as the lunchmeat Spam:

Nobody wants it or ever asks for it.
No one ever eats it; it is the first item to be pushed to the side when eating the entree.
Sometimes it is actually tasty, like 1% of junk mail that is really useful to some people.

Spam, whether it be electronic junk mail or junk mail delivered to you by your post office happens! There are some measures that can be taken to help control some of it, but there are no solutions or combination of solutions that will eliminate all the Spam you get.

1. Be selective about who gets your email address. You may want to have a business email address and a personal address. Sometimes, people will have an email address that they only use for other sources. There are many free e-mail services to choose from.
2. If your email reader has a filtering feature, you can set it up to filter unwanted mail. Be careful when using filters as you could block mail that you wanted to see. When filtering it is advisable to redirect to another folder - do not automatically delete (just in case) .
3. Many ISP providers have systems in place to block spam before it even gets to your computer.
4. Finally, just delete messages that you don't want to read.

Phishing Warning!