Spam now 30 to 50 percent of all e-mail

If you think you're seeing more unsolicited commercial e-mail, jokes and chain letters than you did last year, your hunch is right, according to researchers and Internet security experts.

They say spam -- the generic term for these annoying messages -- increased to somewhere between 30 percent and 50 percent of all e-mail in 2002.

While ads for pornography sites and sexual aids grab the public's attention, the largest single category of spam, 32 percent, is financial in nature, according to Brightmail Inc., an anti-spam technology company that tracks spam. These include mortgage offers, debt consolidation, insurance pitches and schemes for making thousands of dollars working from home.