I can’t stand spam, can you? I’m not talking about the food, but the seemingly endless stream of annoying commercial emails that flood most people’s inboxes.
Of course I have no doubt you’re aware of this computer term.
These messages range from mortgage rates to enlarging various body parts, to adult images, and their numbers grow every day. Some experts estimate that junk email accounts 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. Decades later, the way legit emails can get lost in all the junk reminded someone, so they nick-named it spam and the name stuck.
It can be hard to avoid getting your email address on *some* list. It’s commonplace for many people to receive 50 to 100 pieces of spam in a single day – I know some people who get over 300 a day! And the problem is growing worse.
Fortunately here are tips for people to reduce how much spam they get. Here are a few tips:
*Never try to unsubscribe or ask to be removed. Those emails may have a link or a reply address to stop getting emails, but 95% either simply don’t work, or you’re just telling the spammers that they have a live one.
*Never order anything you see in junk email, click through to the website, or in any way respond to the ad. It costs almost nothing for a spammer to send out thousands of emails. Even just clicking a link in one of those emails is enough to encourage them to send even more.
*Try to avoid entering your email address on websites as much as possible. If you do, consider getting a second email account with Gmail or a similar service. That way you can keep your main address private.
Many websites offering contests, joke lists, free greeting cards, etc. sell your email address along with millions of others to spammers around the world.
*Never sign an online guestbook. 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.
* 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 suspect emails. You can also disconnect from the internet completely, but unless you’re still making the mistake of using the out-of-date dialup, this may involve unplugging connectors. Really, the best option is to use the “offline” feature of your email application.
If you use a web-based email service like Yahoo Mail, It’s impossible to use web-based email services offline. Check your mail options for a setting to turn off graphics in emails, or to display mail in plain text only. Turn on any option about blocking or not loading remote images.
These steps can help keep the spammers from knowing you’ve opened the message.
*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.
*To deal with the spam you already receive, most email applications 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 clients, 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. Any spam that shows up in your inbox can be marked (and automatically deleted) with a click. The more spam you mark, the better the program gets at automatically taking care of them. You’ll end up with less junk mail than before.
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.
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 like a computer training cd I hope you found it made sense.
