Email Spam
by Dave Clingman
 

Published in Guadalajara Reporter,
August 14, 2009, page 24

Spam is unsolicited commercial email sent indiscriminately to multiple people.  We've all received them, sometimes dozens or even hundreds a day.  Yikes!  There must be something we can do about it.  Well, the good news is:  there IS something we can do about it.  The bad news is, well, let's get to that a little later in this article.

There are two main methods used for collecting email addresses to add to spam lists.  The first is to scour the internet for email addresses that are posted on websites.  There are computer programs that do nothing but scan through the internet looking for email addresses, easily found by the '@' symbol.

The second method used to collect email addresses is to harvest them from forwarded emails.  These are emails sent by our friends and family that contain an interesting story, news article, funny joke, or something else that people want to read.  You've probably noticed that in these forwarded emails, there is often a very long line of others who have received that email.  There are computer programs which scan such emails and "harvest" the addresses from them.

So, how can you avoid having your email address added to one of these spam lists?  Simple:  (1) don't post your email address on the internet, (2) don't forward emails that are likely to be continually forwarded, and (3) don't have others forward these types of emails to you.

But what if you are already receiving spam?  That's the bad news I previously mentioned.  Once your email address is spammed, there is no way to get it unspammed.  At that point, you have three options:  put up with the spam, change your email address, or use a spam filter.

You can change your email address by contacting your internet company and asking for a different email address, and then notifying your friends and family of the change.  If you do decide to change your email address, you might get one to use with family and friends, and another one to use whenever you have to give your email address to a website.  That way, if that second one begins to get spammed, you can change that email address again without having to notify friends and family.

An alternative to changing your email address is using a spam filter, which many internet companies provide free of charge.  The problem with this solution is that no spam filter is perfect, though a few are getting close.  Sometimes the spam filter will miss some spam, so that you must delete them yourself.  At other times, it will filter out an email that you want to receive, which means you still have to wade through the morass of filtered emails to be sure the spam filter didn't take out one that you want to keep.

If your internet company does not presently provide a spam filter, you might contact them and suggest they get Google's excellent Postini.  Otherwise, you will need to find your own spam filter for your computer.  One of the best personal spam filters is ZoneAlarm Pro from www.ZoneLabs.com, which also provides a firewall, another essential computer protection program.

Spam is a fact of online life.  Hopefully in the future, a new email system or new laws will reduce or even eliminate it.  But for now, at least we have options.

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