Spam is named after an old Monty Python skit which took place in a diner where everything on the menu had spam in it. A chorus keeps chanting a song about spam, drowning out conversations. Years later, this reminded someone of how email in your inbox can get lost in all of the junk mail, so they called it spam and the name stuck.
It can be hard to avoid getting your email address on somebody’s list. It’s not uncommon 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 there are ways for people to reduce the amount of spam they get. Here are a few tips:
* Never try to unsubscribe or ask to be removed. Those emails may include a link or a reply address to unsubscribe, but 95% either simply don’t work, or you're just telling the spammers that they have a live one.
* Never order anything advertised in spam, visit the website, or in any way respond to the ad. Spammers send out millions of emails at a time, and it costs them almost nothing. Every order or click through to their website just encourages the spammers to send more and more.
* Try to avoid entering your email address on websites as much as possible, and if you do, consider getting a second email account with Yahoo mail or a similar service. That way, you can enter that address instead of your main email. Most websites offering contests, joke lists, free greeting cards, etc. harvest and sell your email address.
* 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.
* Just opening an unsolicited ad while connected to the internet can alert spammers that they have a live address, so if your email application has a “work offline” option, often found in the file menu, select it before opening suspect emails, or disconnect from the internet completely.
If you use a web-based email service like Yahoo Mail, check your mail options for a setting to turn off graphics in emails, or to display mail in plain text only. This helps 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 programs allow you to create “filters” or “rules” that move incoming email into a specified folder or even right into the trash.
After that, if you follow the tips above, you'll have a good chance of keeping it under control.
Author - Worth Godwin is a computer coach with a dozen years' experience helping computer users of all levels, and has also worked for many years "in the trenches" as a hardware and software tech, solving real-world computer problems.
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