Pat Leslie was resigned to junk e-mail on her home computer. After all, more than 40 percent of e-mail is "spam" or unwanted sales pitches that offer to do everything from making you filthy rich to helping you achieve body parts that nature never intended.

"That doesn't even bother me," says Leslie, who found it easy enough simply to delete such too-good-to-be-true offers as free cell phones, miraculous weight loss and generous shares of gargantuan fortunes socked away in African banks.

It was when Leslie innocently sorted through her e-mail in-box at home and found photographs of a woman engaged in sex with animals that she wondered how the once-friendly Internet had sunk so low.

Leslie, 54, senior administrative assistant for a Southaven, Miss., trucking company, learned that there are only crude defenses to sophisticated spammers and that it is largely up to each computer user to elude spammers who find their way into the computer mailbox.

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