Cyberspace has created plenty of new job titles. Before the Internet, there were no webmasters, online traffic managers, podcasters or spamometer monitors.

That's right, someone, or some organization, has decided to monitor the vast wasteland of unwanted e-mail messages. That's spam, not SPAM, which is canned meat from Hormel.

Ipswitch (www.ipswitch.com), a Lexington, Mass.-based network management company, has been keeping track of the junk that arrives in in-boxes for five quarters. The company said last week that 70 percent of all e-mail received is spam, and the percentage continues to grow.

The Ipswitch folks didn't look into my in-box, where I'd guess the figure is in the neighborhood of 90 percent. I must qualify that, as that extreme figure is my work e-mail, which is largely unfiltered for spam. A suspect message may be flagged as "Possible spam," but it still requires my attention, if even for a nanosecond before I hit the "delete" key.

My personal in-boxes get far fewer pharmaceutical offers, too-good-to-be-true offers to share the wealth from Nigerian royalty and inquiries about my mortgage rate. I use both Yahoo mail and Gmail, from Google, for personal e-mail, and find both do a very good job of filtering the junk from the real thing.

I have also used Hotmail and America Online, which each deploy spam filters, but now check those accounts only rarely. Monitoring three accounts is about all the e-mail I can handle.

Back to the 2006 Summer Spamometer results. Spam has grown 8 percent since the spring survey, and 13 percent since the Christmas 2005 survey. The spam gurus blame phishing schemes as the primary culprit in the rise.

Phishing is the practice of sending deceptive e-mails asking the recipient to share personal information that can lead to identity theft. Phishers commonly disguise their messages to appear as authentic requests from trusted financial institutions or online businesses.

The top five spam topics:

1. Medication, 36 percent

2. Finance/phishing, 19 percent

3. Pornography, 14 percent

4. Electronics/pirated software, 10 percent

5. Mortgage offers, 9 percent

"Until spamming becomes uneconomical, spammers will continue to use time and ingenuity to trick filters into letting their messages through, knowing someone will fall for their sales pitch," said Chris Greaves, Ipswitch sales director for Northern Europe, in a statement.

Sadly, people do click in to buy bogus drugs, seek lower interest rates or gamble on get-rich-quick scams.

I can't stress enough how important it is to keep a sharp eye for the trash that infiltrates your in-box. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is junk.

Share your Internet story with me at agibes@reviewjournal.com.