Spam - it doesn't just come in a can!

By: Jonathan Brazil

Undoubtedly the Internet and e-mail can be hailed as one of the great success stories of our time. However, no success has come without some trailing leeches. The leeches of the Internet come in many shapes and sizes, from computer viruses to computer hackers destroying and accessing sensitive information. Closer to home is something that every e-mail user across the globe is familiar with, "spam".

Put simply spam is unwanted, unsolicited e-mail sent from a wide variety of annoying companies and individuals. Spam will offer you everything from pre-approved credit cards and loans to tempting business ventures and other corporate ideas. More worrying is that spam doesn't stop here; it extends further into the realm of unwanted correspondence. Not all the e-mails received from spammers are simply annoying offers of business deals, the vast majority are of a more explicit adult nature. Spammers are indiscriminate in who they send unsolicited e-mail to; this raises an even more worrying problem of young children becoming the recipients of this type of e-mail.

Why do we get spam? How do these people know my e-mail address? I'm sure that these two questions have already come to the forefront of your mind. Well the reasons are various and it is probably difficult to narrow down exactly why. Some of the known reasons are:

1. Chain mail where large volumes of e-mail addresses are forwarded on along the chain allowing anyone on the chain to extract a list of potential victims
2. e-mail addresses being displayed in plain text on web pages allowing specialised programs known as "trawlers" to poach the addresses from the pages
3. Companies whom you register your e-mail address with, passing on your details to other not so legitimate companies.

Most spam e-mails come through a complex network of servers using false accounts so that it is very difficult or almost impossible to trace back the e-mail to its source. For this reason alone if you reply to an e-mail from a spammer it will probably be rejected as the account you are trying to reply to does not exist. Reporting the e-mail to your Internet provider will most likely do no good either as Internet providers are usually too busy to deal with such small issues and do not have the resources to track down every spam server sending e-mails to their clients.
All is not lost, even though spam will probably continue to plague us all in some small capacity there are steps we can take towards helping to eliminate this unwanted scourge:

1. When passing on jokes or other information to a large body of people using e-mail only put one address in the To field and put all the other addresses in the Bcc field. This will prevent any recipient of your original mail seeing and passing on all the addresses originally included.
2. Take measures to conceal your e-mail address on your webpage so that it cannot be trawled, there are several ways to do this and a little research will help you on your way.
3. Never reply to a spam e-mail or follow any links that ask you to submit your e-mail address to unsubscribe. Chances are that you will only succeed in telling the spammer that your e-mail account is active and you are available to receive more unwanted mail from them.
4. Set up rules in your e-mail client to reject or disallow e-mails from addresses that you notice as being replicated more than once. This won't stop the spam being sent but at least you won't have to look at it.
5. Always check the box to disallow companies from passing on your details to other parties when registering with them online. Most companies provide this feature if you can bear to live without the exciting special offers you may forego.