Did you know that spam email could be more than just annoying? It can be downright dangerous to your financial and personal identity. Today, email spam is the number one method used by cyber-criminals to steal your Internet passwords, bank account and credit card data and much more.

How do they do this? It's quite simple really. These unsolicited emails are known as phishing attempts. The emails often appear to be legitimate messages from companies you conduct business with. Sometimes it looks like your financial institution, your credit card provider, a college or some other company.

In the message, the cyber-criminal will state that you need to verify your account information. The email will include a link and it will look and feel like the real site. The problem is that it is not. The website they send you to is nothing more than a data-harvesting website where they attempt to get you to outright give them your bank account numbers, social security number, credit card number, website passwords and other sensitive data.

How can you prevent this from happening to you? One simple step is to use spam filtering or blocking software in your email inbox. Now we are going to talk about the options you have for downloading free spam blockers and other software that will attempt to prevent spam from appearing in your inbox for FREE.

The first option is to use Google's GMail, Microsoft Hotmail or Yahoo Mail as your email client. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft spend tens of millions of dollars each year developing spam blocking technology and you benefit from it for free with your account. All three of these providers offer POP3 email functionality, which means you can download other email into your webmail and use the spam filtering software to weed out spam messages, phishing emails and other unwanted mail.

If you prefer to use a POP3 email client on your computer, such as Outlook, Eudora or Windows Mail, you may want to consider a program like SpamFighter, POPFile or SpamPal. These are just a few examples.

These programs attach onto your email client and test each email that arrives in your email box. Questionable emails are normally delegated to a spam folder and outright dangerous emails can be deleted automatically if you choose.

The software use blacklist data and other features to weedout spam emails and determine legitimate messages. Sometimes legitimate messages will be flagged as spam, but you can setup rules to prevent this from happening again.

Although today there is no perfect spam prevention or anti-spam software on the market, using the techniques outlined here will go a long way in cutting down on the number of spam messages in your inbox each day.