Everybody Hates Spam

There is nothing like checking your email only to find out that your inbox is swamped with unsolicited message from people you do not know. No you’re not interested to buy dog food, beauty products, slimming pills, plants, or software! But still, you get these irritating emails.

Spam, this tiny four letter word has annoyed millions of people around the world.

What is spam anyway? Spam also called unsolicited commercial email (UCE), unsolicited bulk email (UBE) or junk mail, is unwanted email sent to multiple people usually for the purpose of advertisement.

Spam has produced negative effects aside from annoying people. Apparently, it is a waste of time to sort through tons of email while trying to figure out which email is valid and which is spam. Oftentimes you missed out those important messages just because you thought they were spam. Spam has also the potential to spread virus, pornography, and scams.

It is not only individuals who are affected by spam. Large companies and other businesses are suffering as well.

Many companies have already filed lawsuits against spammers who send spam and claim that they are from those companies, when in fact they are not and were just sent to cause turmoil and ruin the companies’ reputation.

The NCSA and Bank of America released a study called “Online Fraud report” and it showed that 87 percent of its respondents were confident that they could distinguish real emails from fraudulent emails. It turned out that 60 percent failed to identify the legitimate emails. This only shows that the spam problem has become even worse. Most people could not even recognize legit emails from spam.

Receiving spam is indeed such a hassle for people and for businesses.

You may be wondering how these spammers found your email address. With the existing technology available today, you should not be surprised to find that spammers use a lot of techniques for them to obtain other people’s email addresses. They could get email addresses from DNS listings, Usenet postings, or web pages, they also could guess common names at popular domains, or use programs called web spiders to search for email addresses on the web.

So how do you get rid of spam? Unfortunately, there is no 100 percent solution to this problem. You may try anti spam software or spam filters but this will only reduce the number of spam that you receive but will not totally eliminate them.

Another thing that you can do is to click that unsubscribe link, usually found at the bottom of email spam.

As I told you earlier, some spammers acquire email addresses through guessing common names at popular domains so it would be wise to set up an email account that is hard to guess. Use a different email when signing up with forums, mailing lists, chat rooms, news groups, and registering with websites.

Aside from email spam, a new range of spam has recently emerged. Spammers have found new ways on how they could get those spams to people. The new target of spammers are news groups, forum groups, instant messaging, online game communities, blogs, and even guest books.

With spam rising progressively, it is really important that you understand its nature and protect yourself through learning more on how you can get rid of it. Spam can waste your time, energy, and money so it would really be wise that you know how to block those annoying messages.

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Digging Into Spam And Filtering Services

If you talk to anyone who uses email, spam is something that is frequently on there mind. How often is it that you open your inbox checking for an email from your mom, and you end up with emails with subjective titles involving animals, and foreign objects.

There are ways to fight back against Spam, and one of the most popular is through the use of a spam filtering service. There is all different types of spam, and surprisingly not all of them involve email. Most spamming involves the advertising or otherwise promotion of a product, however this is not true in some cases.

Most common types of spamming include:

• Email spam,
• Link spam and
• Search engine spam.

Email Spam is the simple act of sending out massive amounts of 'junk email' to anyone and everyone, in order to promote a product. Often times spamming has been exploited by more 'undergorund' industries such as the adult industry, but it would be unfair to say that other industries haven't used it as well.

Link Spam is a form of spamming or spamdexing that recently became publicized most often when targeting the increasingly popular weblogs. Weblogs is one of the biggest problems, however link spam also affects guestbooks, and online discussion boards. The purpose behind spamming these various places, is to display hyperlinks to a various page or product, which helps both with user exposure and search engine popularity.

Search engine spam is usually closely related with the above "link spam", as it is the process of creating countless numbers of pages, that populate search engines. Often times these pages will be full of garbage text and have no real value on there own. When a user visits them, they will either be re-directed to a completely different page, often times on another domain, or show prominent advertising.

Everyone can take their part in removing spam. The easiest way for a general user to not encourage spam, is not to use it. Spammers only spam, because it must be effective, otherwise they would find something better to do with their time. It is also recommended to get various levels of personal spam protection, which is often times included with anti-virus software. 3rd party solutions such as Hotmail, have very good spam detection, however often times spam will leak in, and in that case you can help hotmail out by notifying them of the occurence, so that they can better help protect you next time.

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