1. What is spam?

 "Junk" mail. Unwanted advertising, fraud attempts, nuisance mail,
may or may not contain virus attachments, links to spyware sites, etc.

2. Why do I get spam?

 Email addresses are harvested from web pages, guessed from common names,
harvested by viruses from victim's address books, among other ways.
See http://www.joewein.de/sw/spam.htm

3. Why do they send it?

 It's profitable. According to the article "Cybercrime does pay"
< http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3513_7-6427016-1.html?tag=nl.e501 >
A 20 year old kid in California is said to have made about $60,000
over a six-month period from a 10,000 node botnet. (Botnets of over
1,000,000 nodes are known.)

4. What can I do?

 We have prepared an antispam filter and settings that will fractionate
mail into three catagories "Spam" "Ham" and "Unsure". The first has a
high certainty of being unwanted, "Ham" is legitimate mail and "Unsure"
is self explanatory.

 Save or copy the attached file "sample.procmailrc" to ".procmailrc"
in your home directory. Note that the first character is a period,
i.e. "[dot]procmailrc".

 A new mailbox will appear in your folders, "spam.unsure" the first
time new mail is catagorized as Unsure. You should check this mailbox
occasionally (2-3 times a week) as there is about a 30% probability
the mail is Ham, (i.e. 70% Spam). If you want this mail to appear your
inbox, where you can sort it out normally, just comment out the lines
in .procmailrc that perform this separation.