Monitors across the world have reported a massive increase in reported and detected instances of spam in the late part of 2006 and early 2007, leading experts to believe that the rest of the year is going to be a torrid time in the war against spammers.

It is widely accepted among the anti-spam reporting communities of bloggers and more formally by well-known security authorities that spam has increased in incidence by approximately 250%.

One of the main contributing factors in this multi-fold increase is that spammers are reportedly becoming more strategic in their tactics in spreading commercial and nuisance messages.

In order to pose as regular emails spammers now transmit their messages through image files.

This makes text-based filters now obsolete for a majority of spam messages circulating. If a text-based filter attempts to analyse an incoming email for keywords that may trigger it to be automatically marked as a nuisance message it will fail as the messages are stored within an image which is displayed to the user.

The effectiveness of this new style of spam campaign is evident with two thirds of nuisance messages now appearing in this format, leading to anti-spam moguls to have a fundamental rethink about how filtering ought to be approached.

This leaves internet users with a need for extreme care in the distribution of their email address, and in opening suspect emails which could contain viruses.

Top three key tips to avoid spam in 2007:

1. To prevent email harvesters from gathering your email address, in the event that you have to post it on the internet, do so in a non-direct way. Instead of posting your-name@domain.com, put it in the form your-name AT domain DOT COM.

2. Self-diagnose the prevalence of your email address on the internet. Type it into popular search engines and see if it appears on any websites. Try to get it removed if you find this to be the case.

3. Set up a separate email address that you use for internet accounts, and a separate email address for personal use.

Good luck!