It's sort of relieving to hear I'm not the only person wondering if my email address is being freely circulated amongst bored Russian teenage hackers working for the mafia or to clever Sudanese victims of militia oppression who just happen to have access to 10 million dollars that they'll give me a cut of if only I'll provide my bank account number.

According to the New York Times, spam is back, and with a vengeance.

"Unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet. As more of their text-based messages started being blocked, spammers searched for new methods and realized that putting their words inside the image could frustrate text filtering. The use of other people’s computers to send their bandwidth-hogging e-mail made the tactic practical."

According to one internet security expert:

Some antispam veterans are not optimistic about the future of the spam battle. “As an industry I think we are losing,” Mr. Peterson of Ironport said. “The bad guys are simply outrunning most of the technology out there today.”