That doesn’t mean you have to burn precious cell phone minutes answering their calls or reading their texts.

As the Apple commercial likes to remind us: There’s an app for that.

The two most popular smartphones by far — the BlackBerry and the iPhone — both have software that will attempt to block most of the known spammers operating these days.

For the BlackBerry, you can get Call Control Pro from the folks at EveryCall. There’s a free version that blocks the top 100 spammers; the upgrade ($7.99) gets you protection from the company’s entire database of spammers.

Over at the iPhone’s App Store, there’s software called “Call Block” that’s only $1.99 (there’s no free version) and the software gets pretty lousy reviews from buyers. But for $1.99, it could be worth a try.

The trouble with all of this software is that it relies on known spammers. Any app of this sort would necessarily need almost constant updating as spammers change numbers  almost hourly.

Most of us rely heavily on the caller ID built that’s part of all phones to screen unwanted or anonymous calls. Letting unrecognized numbers to go to voice mail is one answer; few spammers leave a message. But it’s also a surefire way of missing some important phone calls just because the number’s unfamiliar.

Anyone out there with better suggestions?

That staggering fact comes to you courtesy of MessageLabs, now a part of the electronic security behemoth Symantec.

MessageLabs’ recent Intelligence monthly report featured these highlights — or maybe we should call them lowlights:

• Spam made up 90.4% of all e-mail in May 2009 (that’s an increase of 5.1% since April)
• Viruses –- One in 317.8 e-mails in May contained malware (a decrease of 0.01% since April)
• Phishing –- One in 404.7 emails comprised a phishing attack (an increase of 0.11% since April)
• Malicious websites –- 1,149 new sites blocked per day (a decrease of 67.7% since April)
• Spammers continue to abuse reputable domains and web-based malware more likely to be found on older domains
• Geographic location determines at what time of day you receive spam (if you are located in the US, spam
  activity peaks between 9 – 10 a.m. local time, and trails off to much lower levels overnight. Europeans are likely to receive a steady stream of spam throughout their day, while users in the Asia-Pacific region are likely to start their day with an inbox already full of spam, with only small amounts trickling in after this point until the evening), and
• “Russian” spam squarely rooted in Cutwail botnet.

Who’s getting hit hardest? The report’s “vertical” trends showed:

• In May, the most spammed industry sector with a spam rate of 89.2 % was the Automotive sector.
• Spam levels reached 88.1 percent for the Healthcare sector, and 87.9 % for the Agricultural sector; 87.5 % for Manufacturing and 87.4 %  for Retail.
• Virus activity in the Education sector rose by 0.04% and remains positioned as the most targeted vertical with 1 in 112.5 e-mails being infected.
• Virus levels for the IT Services sector were 1 in 249.1, 1 in 433.5 for Retail, 1 in 211.0 for the Public Sector and 1 in 466.9 for Finance.

Your inbox is full of it, your servers are clogged by it and, like mosquitoes and gray hair, everybody hates it.

Spam.

Those annoying, useless e-mail messages about enlarging body parts or not-to-be missed stock opportunities seem to breed in your in-box. They multiply faster than bunnies and no one seems to know how the folks who send it got their e-mail address in the first place.

Webopedia, the online tech research site, defines spam as:

“Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. However, if a long-lost brother finds your e-mail address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it’s unsolicited. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.

“In addition to wasting people’s time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail. However, some online services have instituted policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers.

“There is some debate about the source of the term, but the generally accepted version is that it comes from the Monty Python song, “Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam…” Like the song, spam is an endless repetition of worthless text. Another school of thought maintains that it comes from the computer group lab at the University of Southern California who gave it the name because it has many of the same characteristics as the lunch “meat” Spam:

• Nobody wants it or ever asks for it.
• No one ever eats it; it is the first item to be pushed to the side when eating the entree.
• Sometimes it is actually tasty, like 1% of junk mail that is really useful to some people.”

So why should finance be worried about spam? Because the new generation of spammers aren’t just trying to sell you herbal remedies and shares of obscure mining companies in Mozambique. There’s plenty of spam out there carrying viruses, Trojans and attempting to recruit you and your employees to be part of the notorious world of “botnets” — a web of computers that unknowingly send out spam.

Spam also eats up valuable server space and bandwidth that could be used for more productive uses.

Your IT group is probably using spam filtering software to try and manage to influx of all this junk, but spammers are very sophisticated about evading these traps. It’s likely your techies will want to upgrade anti-spam software regularly so they can stay one step ahead.