Spam

Spam is fast becoming the generic term for unsolicited commercial email. If you don't want the email and didn't ask for it, then it's spam.

Why do people and companies send out Spam? The idea behind spamming is that it's virtually free to send out a bulk email to millions of users, and if any one of those users buy the service or product offered then the spammer has made a profit. Spammers will also sell the email addresses they know are active to other spammers.

How have they found my Email address? There are many ways spammers can get your address, you may have given your address to a legitimate company, this company, for what ever reason, has then sold your address to a spammer. You could have also sent a message to a news group which a spammer has found, they may have gone through the domain name records to find your domain name and sent an email there, or with the likes of hotmail may have just guessed and got lucky.

A trick that some spammers use is to include a bit of code in their spam that confirms your address when you look at it, you don't have to open the spam for this to work - the preview pane in MS Outlook will activate the confirm code. Another trick that some spammers us is they will include an unsubscribe function, that rather than doing so will confirm your address as active.

How can I stop spam? To put it bluntley, other than unplugging your internet connection, it's nowimpossible to stop spam 100% - spammers find new ways of harvesting email addresses and bypassing spam guards, and are generally successful. What you can do is reduce the amount of spam emails you get by using a spam filter. A spam filter will generally have a list of email addresses and spam messages that it will compare with any new email you recieve, if there is a good match up then the spam filter will either stop the message outright or mark it as suspected spam.

Of course one problem with this method is that there may be false positives - and email may come through from a company, a customer or a friend that looks like spam but isn't so its safer to mark a message as suspected spam rather than deleting it outright.

For a stand alone computers using Windows operating systems one of the better spam filters is SAProxy. This is a program that collects your email for you and marks any suspect emails with the word spam before delivering the email to your email program as normal.

What is SPAM? There is a meat based product called SPAM Luncheon Meat produced by an American company called Hormel Foods. Don't get them mixed up, they won't like it.