"Open up your email on any given morning and you might get two or three notes from friends — and twice as many from people trying to sell you energy pills, offshore real estate or virility enhancers."

"And some promise riches: You've just won the Lithuanian National Lottery, which you cannot recall entering, or that a man in Kenya needs your help: "Please, sir, only you can help" to move $20 million through your bank account; all he needs is your routing number."

"That's spam. Not the meat-like loaf, but unbidden emails, many of them not even sent by actual people, but robot programs. And their volume is often much greater than the amount of real information people find in their inboxes."