Q: What causes e-mail messages to get filtered by spam filters? I seem to be having problems with people saying they did not get my message more often these days. — Jerome

SYDNEY, Australia - An Australian man under investigation for illegal spamming sent more than 2 billion e-mails promoting Viagra in a year, an official said Wednesday.

BRUSSELS, Belgium - Unsolicited e-mails continue to plague Europeans and account for between 50 and 80 percent of all messages sent to mail inboxes, the European Commission said Monday.

DALLAS — Ten years ago, a librarian posted a message on one of the first online discussion groups devoted to battling spam. ‘‘Is it just my imagination, or is the spamming rate suddenly picking up?’’ she asked in August 1995.

May 2, 2005

WASHINGTON - Members of Congress are proposing a variety of ways to fight unwanted e-mail.

Q. I have not received (your) weekly newsletter since July 2007. I have checked online and (it says) I am a member, and it is checked that I should get your weekly letters. Why am I not getting them?

Q: I clicked on some group lotto thing and entered info to get into some lottery thing. I specifically did not check the boxes asking if I wanted advertisements sent to my e-mail.

Q: I didn’t seem to have much of a spam problem until recently, but now it is getting out of control. What can I do to fight this big waste of my time? — Paul

Ken Colburn: Gmail has a very small learning curve, and I promise you that it will drastically change your e-mail life in a very good way!

June 3, 2004

November 18, 2004

April 25, 2005

January 3, 2005

Lately, more people are declaring bankruptcy. No, they’re not financially insolvent. They just can’t keep up with e-mail.

SAN FRANCISCO - Two of the world's biggest e-mail account providers, Yahoo Inc. and America Online, plan to introduce a service that would charge senders a fee to route their e-mail directly to a user's mailbox without first passing through junk mail filters, representatives of both companies said Sunday.

LANSING, Mich. - Starting Friday, parents can sign up for what Michigan officials say is the nation's first registry aimed at keeping spammers from sending children inappropriate e-mail.

NEW YORK - Mark Nichols runs an online gift shop and considers himself Internet savvy. Yet like so many other Web surfers, he got duped by an e-mail scam anyway.

Q: If an e-mail account has been hacked, is it advisable to delete the old account to keep it from continuing to be used, or is it too late? —Kathy

NEW YORK - A virus that debuted this week has been declared the fastest spreading e-mail plague of all time, while another malicious program that hit last week continued to disrupt computers worldwide.

Someone is using my e-mail address and other information to sign me up online for various groups, seminars, etc. Are there laws regarding this?

Q.We enjoy sending pictures to grandparents, but we have lost our auto compression feature in Outlook. How do you turn back on the auto compress feature? — Larry