Spam

What is a spam?

An e-mail message consider a Spam when it is unsolicited by the recipient (the recipient did not request and had no given permission to receive it) and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients with aim to market certain products which is commercial in nature.

What is the problem?

Spam is a major problem that takes up valuable time and increases costs for consumers, business and governments. Spam also consumes computer and network and resources. One of the security concern is Spam has become a growing source of computer viruses.

Not all are spam!

Not all e-mail messages are consider Spam. For example, some recipients may have willingly chosen or opted-in to receive the marketer’s email. Other like, an infected PC by worms or viruses, send copies of emails to all recipients stored in the address book and email chain forward by your friends – they are not Spam.

To Spam, the Spammer need e-mail address. There are a few ways Spammers can gather your e-mail address. The simple way, Spammers can buy 100 million plus e-mail addressees on a single CD. Some Spammers use e-mail harvester program, this program goes around the Internet – from web site to web site, most of time online forum and newsgroup, just to collect e-mail addresses. The e-mail harvester program can gather more than 200, 000 e-mail addresses in a very short time. Other Spammers use ‘dictionary’ program to generate e-mail addresses e.g. jenny@yourdomain.com. Once Spammers have enough e-mail addresses, they simply "load" these e-mail addresses into their bulk mail program and hit Send button.

How to prevent spam?

It is very difficult to get away from Spam, but you can reduce them. Here are the best ways to protect your mailbox from Spam:

Have more that one email addresses

Another great way to eliminate Spam is you create more that one email addresses. Use one for private message and the other for you to dispose to the newsgroup or on-line survey. You can create these email accounts through free services like gmail, yahoo mail, lycos mail, hotmail etc. Configure these email accounts to forward to your private email addresses and reply to them uses these free services email. Dispose them if these emails begin to get spam and create another one.

A unique email address

Some Email spammer use dictionary attacks to find out the name combinations at some ISP domain name, example webmaster@domainname.com or sales@domainname.com. Common name likes calvin@ or jenny@ will get more Spam than 993xgG@.

Protect Your Email address

One of the best ways is that you don’t post your email address anywhere on the Internet. Places like newsgroup posting chit-chat room, on-line survey or on-line subscription. These are the sources where email spammer get the all the email addresses.

Gets email account with Spam filter

When you choose email account, get the account comes with Spam filters. Spam filter is a tool that can channel Spam into a bulk email folder or to the trash folder. Nowadays, most of the email account come with this feature, consider these option.

Your Email Client

Install Thunderbird email client software for mozilla. Each email you receive passes through Thunderbird's leading-edge junk mail filters. Each time you mark messages as Spam, Thunderbird improves its filtering so you can spend more time reading the mail that matters. Thunderbird will also use your mail provider's Spam filters to keep junk mail out of your inbox.