PC101-Personal Computer 101
 What causes SPAMNo Spam!and how can I avoid getting it?

Spam is similar to postal junk mail in that it is unsolicited, bulk sales information.  Spammers create commerical sales emails and then email them to millions of people at one time.  They get email addresses by buying lists from other companies, stealing them from websites or sometimes just by guessing what they might be with computer programs.  Many of the emails fail to get delivered and many more are not read, but because they distribute them in such large numbers, and because there is always someone who reads and responds to them, they make good money doing it, hence they exist.

Avoiding Spam, which can be a real problem for many, especially companies trying to conduct business via the internet, is not easy to do, as the Spammers adapt to all new methods to restrict them with technology and lobby to prevent any effective legal methods.

Most ISP's these days come with some form of SPAM filter for preventing SPAM from ever getting to your Inbox.   Most require you to both turn them on and do some basic configuring of how aggressive you want the filter to be.  The concern here is that non-SPAM email may get tagged incorrectly and you never get it.   However the filters have gotten better over time and as I said, you can usually "tune" them to your desire.  Often they have WHITE and BLACK lists, which allow you to either specifically Include certain email addresses or Exclude them.  You can usually use wild cards (*) to cover whole ranges of potential emails, e.g. *@salesoffice.com which if in your BLACK list would exclude ALL email from salesoffice.com.

If you use your browser's builtin email SW then it also probably has a SPAM filter.   Netscape The latter versions of Netscape® Mail for example, has Junk Mail Controls and a SPAM filter called Message Filters...  Using the Message Filters you can send emails automatically to your Trash folder based upon keywords in the Reply email address, Subject, or even the text in the message body (e.g "university diplomas" or "increase penis size").

Should I Open email that looks strange to me?
Generally, if you have a good working anti-virus program running then you can safely Open most all email, as the anti-virus program should check the email for viruses as it is being downloaded from the mail server to your computer, and if you read your mail on the web mail server using some kind of Web Mail program, then you don't have to worry because the email is there (on the server) and not on your computer.
However, if the email is on your computer, you should not click on any URL links, graphics or other attachements in the email if you do not know the Sender.  Because, for example, you might click on a link in the email that says something like: "Hey, check out this cute puppy picture!" and the link is titled: "brownpuppy.jpg", but in fact if you click on it, you actually install a virus onto your computer via an executable or other sneaky method hackers use.

Often Spam email is obviously different from normal email, i.e. it has random sentences at the bottom and sometimes top of the email;  whatever they are selling is often misspelled to avoid anti-spam filtering programs; it will have random letters/characters along the left or right border;  the Subject will be an attention grabbing one, like "Your perscription renewal in now due";  they will have phony return addresses or none, or it will be your email address.

Finally, you can report spam to an anti-spam website like Spamcop®.   Spamcop figures out the true origin of the email and gives you the option to report the email as Spam to the ISP/email administrators.   See the Security section of the Links and References page for joining information.
No Spam!GENERAL RULES FOR AVOIDING SPAMNo Spam! Got questions you would like answered?  Yes

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