Spam and How to Prevent It

Email spam also known as "junk mail" and "bulk mail" has been a problem that has plagued the online and offline world since the inception of the internet. Email spam is an identical email that is blasted to multiple users email folders unsolicited. Spam grew to billions of messages a day and became a big problem for lawmakers since it ended up costing recipients billions of dollars a year.

Since the inception of the internet spam has been illegal through the of Terms of Service/ Acceptable Use Policy of most Internet Service Providers. Unfortunately this has been drastically ineffective in stopping internet spam costing online businesses in excess of $100 billion as of 2007.

There are multiple forms of spam; unsolicited bulk email which is unsolicited email sent in large quantities, email messages that are fraudulent or contain fraudulent information and any email sent through a proxy or botnet. There are also very sophisticated forms of spamming that have come into existence in recent years costing many unsuspecting internet users thousands of dollars, their identity and in some cases their livelihood. Many of these scams are operated in developing countries one of these scams is the Nigerian 419 scam which is a scam that sends emails to users that asks for money to be sent to Nigeria with the promise of thousands of dollars in return.

Another very sophisticated form of spamming which has claimed thousands of internet users is phishing. With phishing spammers attempt to scam users by asking them to enter personal information and bank information on fake websites that are made to look exactly like authentic websites such as banks, organizations etc... Almost 80% of spam can be traced to less than 200 spammers in North America and Europe, many of them utilize this phishing, 419 scams and unsolicited bulk email.

There are definitely ways to prevent these kinds of things from ruining your computer and making the overall the computer experience very difficult for you. Most of all you have to be careful with what you open in your email, make sure you have a spam filter on your email account and invest in a good anti-spy and spam software. Also make sure your children are not on websites that will leave your computer vulnerable to attacks from viruses and spy software. You will be surprised at how far these few things can go. Overall be careful but still enjoy the computer and web surfing experience.