Although it is only November, the dreaded Christmas spam has made its unwelcome entry into in-boxes around the world.
But there is good news at hand.
The closure of a web hosting firm that is believed to have had spam gangs as clients has led to a drastic reduction in junk mail.
Two United States Internet service providers pulled the pin on McColo following an investigation by the Washington Post newspaper.
Anti-spam firm Ironport reported it had seen junk mail levels drop by 70% since McColo was taken offline on November 11. But it warned it would be a temporary respite.
McColo was believed to have hosted gangs running botnets - networks of computers that had been taken over by criminals to send malicious software and spam.
MessageLabs says botnets are responsible for more than 90% of spam.
And in case you think that spammers are wasting their time sending out millions of emails, there were some disturbing reports coming out of the University of California.
One report from the university showed that spammers were turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5 million emails they send.
By hijacking a working spam network US researchers uncovered some of the economics of being a junk emailer.
The analysis suggests that such a tiny response rate means a big spam operation can turn over millions of dollars in profit each year.
A team of researchers from the university took over part of the Storm network that uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail.
At its height, Storm was believed to have more than one million machines under its control.
The team created several so-called "proxy bots" that acted as conduits of information between the command and control system for Storm and the hijacked home PCs that actually sent out junk mail. The team used those machines to control a total of 75,869 hijacked machines and routed their own fake spam campaigns through them.
Two types of fake spam campaigns were run through the machines. One mimicked the way Storm spread using viruses and the other tried to tempt people to visit a fake pharmacy site and buy a herbal remedy to boost their libido.
The fake pharmacy site was made to resemble those run by Storm's real owners but always returned an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.
After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted.
Taken together, the sales represented a bit over $US100 ($NZ182) a day.
Scaling that up to the full Storm network, the researchers estimated the controllers of the vast network were netting about $US2 million a year.
While that was a good return, it suggested that spammers were not making the huge amounts of money that some people had predicted in the past.
While travelling around on the election campaign, I forwarded all of my email to my Telecom Samsung worldmode phone. That was a mistake.
Because of filters, I hardly get any spam in any inbox. Xtra and Google have improved their filtering, although Google is a bit aggressive online. But there was no filter I could get to work adequately on my phone and hence I was tempted by all sorts of offers that I should not refuse.
Lotteries were won, trips were at my beck and call and the holiday season was the time to get in early and buy some online bargains, according to the messages received.
But beware if you get one which reads: "Before you know it Christmas will be here and you will be rushing around trying to find that perfect gift. Why not get started now with our wide selection of quality timepieces you can't go wrong".
It was a particularly nasty piece of spam that left a scar, of sorts, on my phone.
Careful attention was needed to rid the message completely from the inbox, then the deleted file. It was the first piece of spam to attack my phone. Hopefully, it is the last.