I am currently being bombarded with a lot of mail which consists of advertising for products. Is there any way of stopping this? I am also being flooded with emails carrying the w32.Klez.gen@mm virus - currently about 30% of my incoming email. However, I can’t advise the people concerned as they just come with a prefix like ‘unknown03b7.data’. Is there anything one can do?

It seems that unfortunately you are being hit with spam (unsolicited email advertising). This happens when your email address has been distributed to mass-mailing lists which are commonly used, as you have discovered, for advertising purposes. There is really no way to stop spam but there are ways to lower the inconvenience which spam causes you. Utilities are available which can be used to filter email before it is downloaded, and in theory these could automatically delete spam. However, I have never used any such utilities so I cannot vouch for their reliability. You can find quite a few email filter utilities by searching for ’spam’ on most shareware sites. You could also do a search on the internet, from for example, Google.com, for ’spam’ which may yield several sites which provide information on how to prevent spam. Regarding your second problem with the w32.Klez.gen@mm virus, unfortunately this virus has the ability to spoof the ‘From:’ field on emails. This may sound like computer jargon to you, but it explains why you are getting the odd ‘From’ addresses such as ‘unknown03b7.data’. The principle of spoofing is best explained in the article securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.klez.gen@mm.html which gives a detailed description of this type of virus. As for being able to do anything about it, unfortunately there is not much that can be done apart from changing your email address.