How to Stop Spam in Its Tracks

Is spam a daily annoyance to you, too? I’m not referring to the questionable kind of meat that comes in a tin, but the deluge of deceitful and obnoxious commercial emails you never signed up for.

No doubt you’re familiar with this computer terminology .

The content of the messages range from mortgage rates to “enhancing body parts, to porn, and their numbers grow every day. Some experts estimate that spam counts for over 90% of all emails!

Spam is named after an old Monty Python skit which took place in a diner where everything on the menu had spam in it. Conversation is almost impossible because of the sound of a group of vikings chanting loudly about spam. Years later, the way legit emails can get lost in all the junk reminded someone, so they named it spam and the name stuck.

It can be hard to avoid getting your email address on *some* list. It’s not uncommon for many people to receive 50 to 100 junk email in a single day – I know some people who get over 300 every day! And the problem is getting much worse. 
Fortunately there are ways for people to reduce the amount of spam they get. Here are a few tips:

*Never order anything advertised in spam, click through to the website, or in any way respond to the ad. The spammers are about to email a million people at once, for next to nothing. Every order or click through to their website just encourages the spammers to send more and more.

* Never try to unsubscribe or ask to be removed. Those emails may include a link or a reply address to stop getting emails, but 95%either just don’t function, or you’re just telling the spammers that they’ve got a live one.

* Online guest books are to be avoided at all costs. As an experiment I recently created a new email address and entered it on about five guestbooks I found with a Google search. Within 24 hours I was getting spam, and it grew to dozens a day within a week.

*Try to avoid entering your email address on websites as much as possible. If you do, consider getting a second email account with Yahoo mail or a similar service. So you can give an alternative address.
Many websites offering contests, joke lists, free greeting cards, etc. violate your privacy by sending you spam and selling your address to others who send you even more.

* Simply glancing at the body of a junk email can send a signal to the spammer letting them know you opened it. So if your email program has a “work offline” menu option( You’ll often locate this in the File menu) click it before opening dubious emails. You can also disconnect from the internet completely, but unless you are still stuck using dialup, this may involve unplugging cables. Your best option is to use the “offline” feature of your email client.
You can’t go offline when you use a web-based email service. Check your mail options for a setting to turn off graphics in emails, or to display mail in plain text only. The wording varies from site to site, but the option to turn on will say something like “block remote images” or something similar.
These steps can help keep the spammers from knowing you’ve opened the message.

*To deal with the spam you already receive, most email programs allow you to create “filters” or “rules” that move incoming email into a specified folder or even right into the trash.
Setting filters up can be complicated, but the newer versions of many email programs, including Mozilla Thunderbird and Mac OS X Mail make it much easier.
The programs recognize patterns in spam, and use your address book as a white list of legit senders. Junk that shows up can be marked as spam with a click. The more spam you mark, the better the program gets at automatically taking care of them. You’l be blessed with an uncluttered inbox.
Many internet providers also provide a spam filter which blocks email before it gets to your computer. The problem with this is that they often block legitimate mail and you may never know about it.
Because of this, I recommend using filtering software on your own computer, such as the two programs I just mentioned.

*Avoid forwarding emails to large numbers of people.
Not everyone realizes that when you forward a message, the email addresses of everyone who receives the message is visible to every person who reads it. If any of the recipients is a spammer, or if one of a friend’s computer is infected by certain viruses, they can harvest all of those addresses, including yours.
If you do send an email to multiple people, you can avoid revealing email addresses by entering addresses in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) area instead of To or CC. This will hide the list of addresses from everyone else.
If you’re sending a message from somebody on to others, you should copy and paste just the message into a new email window rather than hitting the forward button — this trims the message down and protects the privacy of others.

Ultimately, spam is a fact of modern life, and it’s next to impossible to avoid all of it, mostly because of what other people are doing with your email. If your current email address is about to collapse from the amount of spam you get, you might be forced to get a new one.

After that, if you follow the suggestions and computer tips above, you’ll have a good chance of keeping it under control. While a written article may not be able to be a full replacement for something with all the benefits of seeing the steps done similar to computer training cds I hope you found it a help.