Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.In 2011,the estimated spam message is around 7 trillion.
E-mail spam, known as unsolicited bulk Email (UBE), junk mail, or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is the practice of sending unwanted e-mail messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients. Spam in e-mail started to become a problem when the Internet was opened up to the general public in the mid-1990s. It grew exponentially over the following years, and today composes some 80 to 85% of all the email in the world.
According to The Radicati Group, there are currently 1.4 billion email users,which makes it all the more the most ubiquitous form of communication in the digital age.This makes Spam artists all the more active.Today,Spam is still widely used by scam artists to get their dirty hands into our private lives, and, ultimately, our bank accounts. People are still getting ripped off by spammers – whether it be through malware, phishing, fake pharmaceuticals, or whatever — and, undoubtedly, these people still care.
How to Stop Spam Email?
Do not respond to suspicious emails. If you suspect an email is spam, delete it. Do not click on email links asking to be removed from the sender’s list. Sometimes unsubscribe links don’t work, and any sort of response only confirms your email address and may result in more unwanted messages.
Set up a disposable email address. Have a secondary address for public use, such as online registration and e-commerce sites. Set up the secondary address to forward emails to your primary account.
Create an email name that’s tough to guess. Research shows that email addresses containing numbers, letters, and underscores are more difficult to guess and tend to receive less spam.
View emails in plain text. Spam written in HTML can contain programs that re-direct the user’s Web browser to an advertised page. Spammers use images in emails to locate active email addresses for future spamming. Consider disabling the email’s preview pane and reading emails in plain text.
Create a spam filter for your email. If your email program does not have a filter, create one that checks for messages that do not include your email address in the TO: or CC: fields. This is a common tip-off for spam. Have the filter transfer possible spam messages to a junk folder. Email filters are not 100% effective, so review the junk folder before deleting it.
Do not post links to email addresses on Web sites. Spammers can locate email addresses on Web pages, so consider displaying email addresses in a way their ‘spambots’ can’t recognize. For instance, instead of John_Doe@company.com, publish the email address as John_Doe[at sign]company.com.
Watch out for check boxes. Before signing up for services or newsletters on the Web, carefully read through everything. Watch out for text at the end of the registration forms, “YES, I want to be contacted by select third parties concerning products I might be interested in.” Sometimes the checkbox next to the text is already checked, so you need uncheck those boxes.
Sources:
- Wikipedia article on SPAM and Email Spam.
