Introduction

After using the Internet for a number of years and witnessing several email addresses losing their usefulness I started researching into spam and the most effective methods of keeping it away from my inbox. After much trial and error I've now managed to reduce my daily intake of spam to a mere trickle. Some weeks, I see no spam whatsoever and in some email accounts I see none at all!

Realising that the effect of spam was more than simply from the time wasted in deleting it, I've compiled this one-stop guide to help others do the same. I hope the information offered here is of some use to you in the fight against spam.

Spam - What is it?

Spam is also known as Unsolicited Commercial Email or UCE for short. It's usually some sort of electronic communication that you haven't agreed to receive hence the unsolicited. The sender of the spam (the spammer) usually wants money from you either by directly trying to sell you a product or service or indirectly by asking you to visit

a website or call a phone number. Spam is the Internet equivalent of the cold caller.

Spammers often employ a whole range of tricks and tools to ensure that they can keep sending these messages. They often employ covert tracking techniques to establish valid email addresses so even if you don't reply to an email to 'unsubscribe' they'll already know you're there and reading!

If you've spent any reasonable length of time on the Internet and you keep an email account, it's almost a certainty you will have received junk mail at some point. Even if you've taken great precautions spammers will eventually get through to you.

How did they find me?

There are dozens of methods spammers can use to obtain or harvest your email address. The most likely way is that you've probably (or worse, someone you know has) published your email address somewhere that is publicly accessible on the Internet. It might have been a forum or a USENET newsgroup posting. There's hardly a place on the Internet where it's safe to put an email address in plain sight!

Many of the techniques that people use to hide their email addresses are known to spammers. Popular anti-spam methods usually result in spammers will work harder to develop countermeasures! If you know how something works then you can be sure that a diehard spammer will too! Whilst it's doubtful that any one technique is foolproof or completely impenetrable, some will stand the test of time better than others.