Let’s face it – spam is everywhere you look on the internet. Unwanted junk email spam is filling our inboxes, pop-up advertisements are wasting broadband, and what’s worse is the fact that some of this spam is actually causing harm to our personal computers. As an average computer user, one might think that you would be able to escape spam when using an instant messenger program to communicate with friends; but as we are all finding out spammers are quickly invading this online medium as well.

Of course to the experts who are familiar with the habits of spammers, this was no surprise – but instant messenger spam really is a serious problem. Especially when you consider the fact that many people actually use an instant messenger for business purposes; and having a pornographic spam message pop-up while you are at the workplace is never a good thing. Additionally, many instant messenger programs are quite popular amongst children, some of which may be quite young. You can imagine the possible ramifications in the event that your child is exposed to porn via an instant messenger spam message.

And unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do to spam filter instant messenger on your end. If anything is going to be done about this, it will have to be done by the companies themselves. In fact, some companies have already started taking measures in an attempt to prevent instant messenger spam when using their services; though so far this hasn’t been nearly enough to fend off the tenacious spammers that are lurking on the World Wide Web today.