 |
If you send or receive e-mail, you've probably gotten junk e-mail, also known as spam. Maybe a lot of spam. Sending spam is a lucrative business. It costs spammers next to nothing to send out millions, even billions, of e-mail messages. And consider this: If even a tiny percentage of a hundred million people buy something in response to a junk message, that's a lot!
Some people and businesses get so much junk email it can be a nightmare, but there are ways of dealing with junk email and even if you can't cut it out completely you can stop a lot of junk email from entering your Inbox.
|
|
Spammers steal, swap, or buy lists of e-mail addresses. Spammers can also build their own lists using special software that rapidly generates millions of random e-mail addresses from well-known providers, like Yahoo, MSN Hotmail and Lycos, and then sends messages to these addresses. Any invalid e-mail accounts return e-mail to the sender, so the software very rapidly records which e-mail addresses are active and which are not.
Spammers also harvest email addresses from websites where people sign up for offers, sign guestbooks, message boards, or harvest emails from groups like MSN Groups or Yahoo groups. These emails can contain anything from trying to get you to purchase medicines through to the latest hot product. You should not be tempted to ever click on a link or even reply to the email as replying to it will just inform them that it is a valid email address.
So what can you do about e-mail spam? Quite a bit, as it turns out. To learn more, read Spam dos and don'ts: What to do with junk e-mail and Help keep spam out of your Inbox with anti-spam software . |
