Business Article - Avoiding Spam
Do you hate running into spam on the Internet? No, we are not referring to the food here, but rather the endless stream of commercial e-mail garbage that is flooding your inbox every single day. The content that you will find in these spam messages varies greatly, ranging from lowering mortgage rates to enlarging sexual body parts, and everything in between. The numbers of spam messages being sent through cyberspace has multiplied as much as five hundred percent in the past few years. More than eighty percent of all e-mail is spam garbage. The biggest problem with spam today is the fact that spammers are constantly looking for new ways to get their message out, even though the spam blocking programs out there are also constantly trying to improve their technology. These days, some experts are speculating that more than ninety-percent of all incoming mail is spam.
The name 'Spam' is actually derived from an old Monty Python skit. In the skit, a chorus is constantly chanting a song revolving around spam, drowning out every other conversation that takes place. Someone must have been reminded of this skit when spam became a problem several years later, so they began to call junk-mail spam, and the name apparently stuck. Avoiding spam can be difficult, and many people find themselves receiving between fifty and three hundred pieces of spam in a single day. The problem is growing much worse over time, so how will you avoid ending up on a spam list, and receiving all of this garbage in your inbox?
Fortunately, there are actually a handful of ways that people can drastically reduce how much spam they receive. Here are a few tips that you should keep in mind to prevent spam from entering your inbox, or to handle spam that does arrive in your inbox:
- Never click on a 'remove' or 'unsubscribe' link in a spam e-mail, and never respond to a spam message. 95% of these unsubscribe efforts do not work in your favor. Typically what you are actually doing is letting a spammer know that your e-mail address is a real account, which will only serve to make the spam issue worse in your inbox.
- Never order anything that is advertised in a spam message, never visit the website linked in the e-mail, and never respond to the ad in any other way. Millions of e-mails are sent out at a time by these spammers, and it costs virtually nothing for them to do so. Every time you click a link, visit a website or otherwise respond to an ad, you are only encouraging these spammers to continue their pathetic campaign.
- As often as you possibly can, try to avoid entering your personal e-mail address account into websites with forms. If you do have to sign up for something that requires your e-mail address, you may want to consider signing up for an account just for this purpose. Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail all offer free e-mail accounts, and registering for one of these can give you a place for potential spam to go without it ever invading your main inbox. You can enter this e-mail address into forms, so that if your e-mail address is harvested and sold off by a contest, greeting card or joke website for example, then you do not have to worry about the ramifications because the e-mail address was both free and disposable.
- Never, ever sign a guest book under any circumstances. Within twenty-four hours you will already be receiving more spam than you knew was possible. Guest books provide a great place for spammers to harvest e-mail addresses, so avoid them at all costs.
- Simply by opening an unsolicited e-mail ad while you have an active Internet connection can be enough to alert spammers that your address is legitimate, so "work offline" whenever possible. What you can do is download all of your e-mail messages, and then go into work-offline mode before you do any reading or deleting. This way, no information is transmitted as you read your e-mails, and you can protect spammers from realizing that you have opened their advertisements.
- If you make use of a website-based e-mail service such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail or MSN, then you should check your mail options to find out if there is a setting for turning graphics off inside e-mails, or for displaying e-mails only in plain text. This can actually help to keep potential spammers from finding out that you have opened a spam message.
- Avoid forwarding any e-mail to people in large numbers. When you forward an e-mail message, you are actually attaching the email addresses for everyone who has ever received the e-mail, making these addresses visible to everyone who receives the e-mail in the future. So if a single one of these recipients is a spammer, or if a spammer has infected a future recipient's computer with a virus, all of these addresses, including yours, may be harvested and sold off for spamming!
- If you do need to send an e-mail to multiple people for any reason, then you should avoid revealing the e-mail addresses of past and future recipients by using the BCC or blind-carbon copy rather than CC or To. This will hide the list of future recipients from everyone else that receives the e-mail.
- If you are sending a message to other people that were received from someone else then a good practice is to copy and paste only the message, rather than simply hitting the forward button. This way, you can avoid forwarding the headers from the old message, trimming the message down in such a way that it protects the privacy of other e-mailers. When you forward e-mail messages, all of the previous recipients and their e-mail addresses are listed, opening them up to spammers and harvesters if you are not careful.
- If you absolutely must post your e-mail address somewhere on the internet, then you should make an effort to post it in such a way that a spider, robot or spammer will not immediately recognize it as a valid e-mail address. For example, rather than typing yourname@yourdomain.com, you can type 'yourname atsign yourdomain dot com'. This may be an extra step for people who are trying to send legitimate e-mails, but it will prove to be a truly effective technique for eliminating e-mail that is not legitimate.
- To deal with whatever spam you are already receiving, there are options for you to create rules or filters for mail messages in most e-mail programs, so that incoming e-mail will be moved into specific folders or even into the trash can depending on whatever rules you create. Setting up filters can be mildly complicated, but it is well worth the effort to have a large amount of obvious spam moved directly away from your inbox. This way, you never have to see the spam e-mails; they are gone before you even know they are there!
- No current online spiders or robots can read text appearing in an image or a graphic. If you need to display your e-mail address on a page, then you can do it simply by typing your e-mail address into a graphics program, and creating a graphic of your e-mail address to distribute. You can post this image into your website or forums, so that real people can see your e-mail address, but so that robots and spammers cannot. This can even create an extra step in the process for human spammers, because they cannot simply copy/paste your e-mail address, but instead will have to type it in. Most spammers are not willing to put any effort into the process, so this may actually deter them as well.
- Many web-based e-mail programs have spam filters already set up, and all that they ask in return is that you mark missed spam messages as spam, so that they may better fine-tune their filters. Gmail, for example, has a great spam filter that catches 80-percent or more of all spam received. The more users who mark spam messages appropriately, the more exact these web-based spam filters can become, and eliminating spam before it ever hits your inbox.
Avoiding spam does take extra effort, but hopefully these extra steps are well worth it in the end, when your inbox is only full of your own personal e-mails, and not a single spam message about mortgages, pornography or free money that doesn't exist.