In the society that we live in today people now class all unsolicited email as spam. This includes automatic replies, emails containing viruses and unwanted but legitimate business propositions.
Spam is nearly as old as the Internet and many believe that the problem of spam will never really go away as spammers are becoming increasingly difficult to stop. They are also finding more and more ways of delivering spam mail around the Internet.
One thing that many of us never really understand is how spammers get our email addresses in the first place. One of the main ways in which this is done is through spammers using computers to check almost every page of websites on the Internet looking for the ‘@’ symbol. If the symbol is found the spammer knows that it is an email address and then simply adds your email address to their database so that when the spammer sends out an automated spam message everyone who is on the database will receive it.
Spammers get your email address without you even realising it. The way in which you can reduce the chance of this happening is to ensure that you don’t place your email address on pages across the Internet; however if you need to do this for example for customers of your business to get in touch with you or if someone has requested your email address you should make it accessible to them by replacing the @ symbol, i.e. name[at]domain[dot]com. Spammer programmes will not be able to pick this up as an email address and you will still be able to place your email address on webpage’s.
Another way in which spammers are able to get a hold of your email address is if your email address is sorted on someone’s computer who gets a virus. Spam virus takes advantage of an infected computer and sends spam emails to all the addresses sorted within that PC. These spam emails do not get sent from the email address of the infected computer owner; they are sent from a fake, spam email address.
If you are finding that you are getting spam messages there are certain steps that you can take to reduce the amount of spam that you receiving, as well as getting a spam blocker/filter you should always remember to never reply to the spam email and never un-subscribe. Many people think that if they request to be taken off a ‘mailing’ list that they won’t receive any more spam emails. This is in fact opposite of what actually happens. If you request to un-subscribe the only thing that you are doing is verifying to a spammer that your email account is valid and they will simply send you more spam mail as they think that you are reading them.
The best reaction to take to spam mail is no reaction. You should never interact with a spammer in anyway as they will just send you more spam emails. To tackle spam messages you should invest in an anti-spam software and let that take care of the spam for you.
Helen is the web master of MySpamBin, specialists in
Anti Spam Software Solutions.
