(Samara Lynn, ChannelWeb) In light of all the ongoing, and terrible, security trends and case studies involving credit-card-number theft, bot attacks and remote execution of malicious code, e-mail spam seems more like a minor nuisance rather than an outright data threat by comparison.

Spam, however, is undeniably part of the threat landscape. Viruses can piggyback on it, but more often than not, spam can build up at exponential rates that may cost users hours in lost productivity as they attempt to rid their e-mail boxes of it.
Spam buildup can also be indicative of holes in a network's security defense. Spammers will often take advantage of open ports on misconfigured firewalls and SMTP servers to relay their annoying messages.

There are lots of products out there to combat spam. Many of them are bundled as all-in-one security solutions that include antimalware, firewall and Web filtering services.