When you open your e-mail inbox, what do you usually find? Your inbox might very well be full of messages from work, family, friends, as well as those notifications from your RSS feeds and whichever social networking sites you belong to.

However, in amongst all those nice little messages are usually those annoying little spam messages - usually offering some way to increase the size of certain body parts, promising large sums of money in foreign currency (all in exchange for your bank account details - yeah right!) and a plethora of other rubbish that is usually confined to a junk mail folder of your e-mail client.

Yes, spam e-mails have become the bane of every computer user over the years. Many will simply delete the offending messages before opening them, but there are still many who will open curious e-mails and be met with malicious software being installed on their machine without them knowing about it.

Lots of us now have access to broadband connections and utilise e-mail in our daily lives. In order to filter out the junk we make use of filters, options on our e-mails that will divert suspicious looking messages into a separate folder, ensuring a safer and less cluttered inbox.

Recently, an internet security company recruited 50 people around the world to turn off their junk mail filters in an attempt to find out the scale of the spam problem, and the results were rather shocking.

Participants were encouraged to reply to those e-mails they received and to investigate the websites that were advertised, with a whopping 104,000 spam messages received during the trial.

Many of these e-mails will attempt to encourage you to open them and then install malware, spyware and a host of viruses onto your machine - ultimately slowing down broadband internet connections and the performance of your PC as a whole.

Many broadband providers will have some form of junk mail filter on their in-house e-mail clients, which can be activated through their browser and ensures safety while browsing.

Protection is key to ensuring that your machine does not become infected with nasties. Choose your virus checker and spyware protection software carefully. If you suspect that your computer has been infected, seek assistance from a professional computer technician.

And remember, don't open e-mails from sources you don't trust.