Ham passwords are often combined with filtering systems, to counter the risk that a filtering system will accidentally identify a ham message as a spam message.

Those idiotic spam messages offering implausible financial windfalls, requiring access to your bank account or whatever, seem to be proliferating.

They could even end up getting more spam messages.

Spam messages now account for more than 90 per cent of all e-mails.

Experts say that about 70 billion spam messages are sent every day worldwide.