Spam is unsolicited junk email. It is not only annoying, but can be offensive, very often carries viruses that can damage your computer, and almost always involves some kind of fraud. The people who generate spam (spammers) do their best to make spam look like legitimate email, which makes it difficult for Virgin Media to block all spam without inadvertently blocking email legitimately addressed to you. However Virgin Media has installed state-of-the-art technology to protect you by filtering as much suspected spam as possible out of your email by default. You can find out more information about other spam filtering options here. These settings will apply even if you collect your email via Outlook Express or any other email program. We also filter all email viruses out of your Virgin Media email. However, you can get computer viruses from other sources like websites, disks or other email services, so it is essential that you also have anti-virus software on your computer.

Where does spam comes from? Spam comes to the UK from all over the world, especially from the US and the Far East, but also from within the UK. The programmers who create spam make money from people who visit the websites, purchase the products advertised, or fall victim to other related scams. Some viruses can also hijack a user's PC and use it to send spam to others whose email addresses it finds in the user's address book. We would normally not treat marketing emails, newsletters & circulars to mailing lists, customer information bulletins and billing emails as spam, even though they may sometimes be annoying, and most responsible senders allow you to opt out of receiving them if you wish.

How to deal with spam Once you've identified an email as spam, it's best to just delete it, and delete it again in your "Deleted Items" folder. Never reply to it, act on it, or try to unsubscribe from it. Trying to unsubscribe alerts spammers to the fact that your email address is in use, and will almost certainly make the problem worse.

How to avoid spam

It is difficult for Internet service providers to block all spam, and while we filter suspected spam out of your Virgin Media email by default, you may still want to use dedicated mail filtering software as a further line of defence.

Be careful where you use your email address online. Virgin Media allows you to use up to 15 email addresses, so you could use one for personal emails and a separate one for public websites, online accounts, newsletters, mailing lists, online forums, newsgroups, chatrooms, logins, and so on. These are much more likely to receive spam as unsecured web connections or websites can be used by spammers to collect email addresses.