A Guide to SPAM Prevention and Ridding Your Computer of SPAM

SPAM is a big problem with the email of today. These days there are plenty of SPAM blockers and such but they're not full proof. This article will show you just how your SPAM problem got (or can get) so bad, how to keep yourself from getting bombarded with it, and how to stop it.

How Did I Get All This SPAM?

SPAM can come from a variety of sources. Let's discuss some of the sources and just how they end up infiltrating your email in droves.

Third Party Marketers

For example: You sign up for a weekly manufacturer coupons sent directly to your email. They're real and they really DO save you money. When you sign up for the free service, you'll be requested to check your areas of interest. There will be about 25 to 50 of them and you can check as many as you wish. You check gardening, writing, and stereos. In the fine print they tell you that they intend to share your email address with companies that may be of your interest based on what you checked. You get your coupons just as they said you would but you also get emails from "Stark Bros" (Gardening), "LuLu.com" (writing) and "Cruchfield" (Home and Car Audio) and several others just like them. And what happens is each one of those companies gives your email to 100 others just like them and they do the same and it has a snowball effect. Soon, you turn on your "Outlook Express" windows email program and you see that it is downloading 72 messages since the last time you checked it (2 days ago) and maybe 2 of them are from friends or family and 1 full of coupons. Exaggeration? Not at all. SPAM can EASILY and QUICKLY become that bad.

Forwards

A Forward or "Fwd", or "Fw" is an email that is forwarded to others. They may come in the form of a text joke, a photo joke, or in some cases a story of a fictitious child who is dying of cancer and is in need of an operation that the parents can't afford. The email will go on to say that some big cooperation such as AOL is tracking the Fwd and has agreed to donate 30 cents or so for every 3 people the email is forwarded to. These particular types of forwards are put out by people who are trying to get a few hundred active emails. Each time any of these forwards are forwarded, all the email addresses that it has been sent to, appear in plain view to all who receive it. Eventually, the fwd makes it way around to the person who originally sent it. They take all those email addresses and sell a list of them to marketing companies and online multi level marketing companies.

Now these two factors play a HUGE role in SPAM but you CAN fight back and get around it. I'll show you how.

Free Email Accounts

Free email accounts are plentiful. Some of them are Yahoo, Hotmail, and Excite. In the case of signing up for a newsletter of some sort, grab yourself a few free email accounts and use those email addresses for things like that. Don't ever give a company like that your main email address.

Education

Educate the people who are sending you forwards. Do you best to eliminated them all together. Ask people not to send you them but if you really enjoy receiving them, educate those who are sending them to you. Tell them about "BCC"

BCC

BCC stands for "Blind Carbon Copy". Kindly ask the people who send these forwards to you to put your address in the BCC field. If they send a forward to 10 people and use BCC, the copy that you (and the other 9 people get) will not display your email address or any of the other 9 people. The "To" field will say, "Undisclosed Recipient". The less strangers that know your main email, the better.

Unsubscribe

99% of all the SPAM you get will have an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Click on that link and follow the instructions for removal. Depending on how much SPAM you get, this may take a while but generally, these unsubscribe links DO indeed work.

SPAM can become a big problem. It's frustrating and it will continue to get worse if you don't do anything about it. But a few simple preventative maintenance procedures can cut it down and eventually eliminate it all together. Woundn't it be nice to check your email and only have email that you WANT? That dream CAN come true