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Email is a great way to communicate because it is so easy to use. Once an email is written, it take very little effort to send it to as many recipients as you wish. It is this ease of use that spammers take advantage of.
Junk emails are often attempting to sell you something, or even worse embezzle money from you. The people sending them are playing a numbers game. They know that a few emails out of the thousands that they send will lead to a successful sale or theft.
How to avoid spam
The best way to avoid spam is to keep your primary email address (the one associated with your ISP or domain) as private as possible. Avoid entering it in forms on websites unless it is a well known and trusted site with a clear privacy policy. Also, try to avoid entering your main email address into paper forms, e.g.. magazine competitions or high street market research.Open a second email account from one of the free providers such as Googlemail and use this for occasions where you have to give out an address but don't feel confident about their privacy policy. If it starts getting spammed, you can always abandon the address and open a fresh one.
What to do if you are getting spammed
One option is to simply change your email address. A new address will almost certainly stay spam free for a long time if you are careful how you use it., however many people find this inconvenient at best, so what are the other options?If the account which is receiving the junk mail is your main ISP account you can often adjust the level of spam filtering in the web interface of your account. If the spammed account belongs to your own domain, you often have much more freedom in applying spam controls (ask your hosting provider). If all else fails, it should be a simple matter to set up another email address under your own domain whilst maintaining control of the old one.
Never reply to junk email or click on an unsubscribe link unless you know that the company tat sent it is well known and trusted. This simply alerts spammers that there is a live person at the other end and the amount of spam being sent will probably increase.
What about installing Spam Block Software on my PC?
Most after market software which promises to block spam is not usually a very effective way of tackling the problem. These programs wait for the junk email to arrive on your PC and then attempt to separate it from your genuine email by mean of blocking specific senders or comparing the mail with online lists. They often are over zealous, treating genuine mail as spam and deleting it! However there are a few after market spam filters that really are worth having, these are filters based on Bayesian filtering.Bayesian filters attempt to learn what you consider spam and what isn't. The drawback with these filters is that they require 'training' when you first install them. Normally this is simply a matter of clicking on each mail to tell the filter what is spam and what isn't. After a week or two, the filters can become surprisingly effective. See the related article computer security 101 for more information and suggested software in this category.
