Virus writers, spammers, and porn peddlers are finding e-greetings a useful means to deliver their wares.

E-greeting cards from Yahoo!, Blue Mountain, and Egreetings have gained popularity over the years, largely because they can be delivered immediately and come with cute graphics and special messages. But now virus writers, mass marketers, and porn websites are taking advantage of the e-greeting trend to infiltrate computers. See how tonight on "Tech Live."

There are still legitimate e-greeting cards out there, but overall I recommend not opening them unless you are absolutely sure they are for real.

E-greeting spyware

A company called Email PI is marketing a spyware product that you install by sending your surveillance subject an e-card. Once they open the digital greeting, a key-logger begins copying passwords, recording instant messaging sessions, and copying emails. All that data is sent back to the Email PI client.

The website for Email PI even states it can record phone conversations if the subject has a voice modem attached to his or her computer. The site claims those conversations will be emailed to whoever is engaging in the surveillance. SpyCop, a program that detects and removes spyware, says it is aware of the Email PI program and that its program will remove it on affected systems.

Pop-up porn

A trojan progam called Ortyc sends out a goofy graphic e-card that installs a marketing program that assaults you with porn pop-up ads.

The e-card may arrive as an email with a message alerting you that you have received an e-card. It then links you to the website, where a permission box pops up saying an extra program is needed to view the card. This is what secretly installs the porn pop-up program.

To remove the program, run a full antivirus scan, which should clear the downloaded files. Full registry edit removal instructions can be found on Symantec's website.

Finally, "Tech Live" recently also alerted viewers to another email e-greeting scam that many thought to be a virus. The greetings, from the seemingly defunct website FriendGreetings.com, raids users' Outlook address books and looks for new contacts to forward itself to. The good news, however, is that the "greeting" isn't a virus. Outlook users can create a message rule or filter deleting all messages that come in with the subject line "you have a card from."