Yellowknife (Mar 07/03) - In the evolutionary scheme of things, junk mail has its own distinct lineage and inherent desire for successful reproduction.

Systems administrator Markham Breitback at SSI Micro's main server: The Internet provider intercepts thousands of spam e-mails a day, but can't catch them all. - Mike W. Bryant/NNSL photo

And nowhere is this more evident than in its latest manifestation, the dreaded e-mail spam.

People cringed in the 1970s coming home to mail boxes full of coupons, flyers and sweepstakes forms promising a million dollar bonanza.

They were livid in the 1990s as company fax machines began draining paper cartridges to print out a rain forest worth of cheap advertisements.

And now, in the 21st Century, we've been blessed with the most prolific of scourges -- spam -- sending out, according to The London Observer, 10 billion e-mail spams daily -- advertising everything from quick cash schemes to devises promising to make your genitals grow to enormous proportions.

In a recent experiment, reported by The Globe and Mail, it took just 540 seconds for a new e-mail account to receive its first spam.

"On a Monday... I could have a hundred messages," says Alain Bessette, editor of Yellowknife's community French newspaper, L'Aquilon.

"Of which there's about 30 that go right into the trash because they go through a filter but the filter can't catch everything."

Bessette says filters designed to stop spam going into one's inbox can be a problem in itself because they can mistake important e-mails for spam.

"I added the word 'win' (to filter settings) but if the three letters w-i-n were in a message (with a word) like 'winter' it was like, 'Oops they went into the trash,'" says Bessette.

Markham Breitbach, a system administrator with local Internet provider SSI Micro, says the best solution to prevent spam from accumulating is to never, ever open them. If it looks even remotely suspicious, delete it.

And for Heaven's sake, don't sign up to newsgroup bulletin boards.

"As a general rule only give your e-mail address to people that actually need it, that you know and trust," says Breitbach. "Even if you're signing up for Joke of the Day, a lot of them are just a scam to get e-mail addresses."

So if they're so awful, why does e-mail spam even exist? Breitbach says, believe it or not, some people -- if only a tiny percentage of those assaulted -- actually respond.

"There's people out there that actually go, 'Hey, I need ink jet re-fill cartridges,' or whatever."