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Spam
What
is spam?
Spam is the email equivalent of junk mail. A spammer (a person or
organization that emails spam) generally distributes spam to a massive
number of email addresses. Spam usually advertises products or services,
but sometimes spam contains a message intended to further a political
or other cause. According to a report from Brightmail, a company
that provides spam-filtering services to ISPs (Internet service
providers) and businesses, approximately 20% of the email messages
entering U.S. inboxes each day are spam, and that percentage is
constantly growing. Reputable businesses and organizations often
send email messages to many recipients simultaneously, but these
messages differ from spam because they are sent to known recipients
and include instructions that recipients can use to remove themselves
from the distribution list.
Why am I getting spam?
Regardless of its content, spam ends up in your email client’s
inbox because a spammer has received or purchased your email address
from a third party, or found it by searching the Internet, and added
the address to its spam list. Some spammers use robot software (also
known as bot, crawler, or spider software) to find email addresses;
search engines, such as Google, use robot software to collect Web
pages and thereby supply users with the most current search results,
but spammers use robot software to find and scrape (copy into a
database or other program) email addresses. Additionally, spammers
sometimes scrape email addresses from Internet chat rooms and bulletin
boards, so avoid posting your email address in such forums. Spammers
often exchange email addresses with other spammers, and there are
Web sites dedicated to helping spammers distribute spam more widely
.
What should I do with spam?
This question is the subject of a long-running debate among ISPs
and other Internet and email authorities: Some argue that you should
reply to the spam message with a request to remove your email address
from the spam list or reply to the “unsubscribe” email
address that’s frequently listed at the end of a spam message,
and then delete the spam; some argue that you should delete the
spam without replying. The logic behind deleting spam without replying
is that when you reply to spam you are letting the spammer know
the message has reached an active email address. Spam management
studies have been largely inconclusive, and there is still no consensus
between the two arguments.
How do I keep from getting spam?
Spam is so pervasive that all popular email clients and membership-based
email services provide easy methods for filtering spam. Microsoft
Outlook, for example, includes the Junk E-mail filter. To use this
feature, click the Inbox icon, select Organize from the Tools menu,
click the Junk E-mail link, and click the Turn On button; this tells
Outlook to examine incoming email for phrases typically found in
spam, and the result is that these messages will appear gray in
your Inbox. Other email clients and services, such as Eudora, AOL,
Earthlink, and MSN Online, have comparable features; access the
online help and look for topics that include the words “filter,”
“spam,” “junk,” or “block” for
details.
What’s the difference between filtering and blocking?
Whether your email client or service has sophisticated email filtering
features, it should have a feature that lets you block incoming
email from specific senders (that is, email addresses) or domains
(represented by the characters in an email address that follow the
at [@] symbol and end in a three-letter code, such as .com, .net,
or .gov). Whenever you receive new spam, you can use the blocking
feature to add all or part of the spammer’s email address
to a blocked sender list. Then, whenever more messages arrive from
that email address, they are bounced back, or returned as if they
were never received. This has limited success, however, as spammers
often have dozens or hundreds of different email addresses at their
disposal from which to send spam
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