Stopping Spam Emails

Many individuals receive spam emails without thinking too much about them.But by working together we can reduce spam and make things safer for everyone.  We’ll examine ways to outwit spam senders and report them to reduce their activity.

Receiving junk emails which are either silly, or making some fantastic claims about products may not seem like a big deal.  After all, there are worse things in life than junk mail?  This may be true but to understand the spam email issue, you need to understand some facts about spam.

For a start, spam email costs money. People who receive unsolicited email in their  new email addresses at work lose time due to dealing with rubbish emails.

Also, some people will be upset by spam.  Many people have been defrauded of money, due to spam emails being received from a spammer who purports to be their bank or building society.  Some people have been taken in by “ill” spammers, or stories of people being left money they need to use a UK bank account to access.  Whilst it is easy with hindsight to look back and think that people were gullible to fall for these kind of scams, at the time, many people were simply unaware of spam, so they didn’t think there was anything to fear.

Therefore spam may not be so innocent or harmless as some think.  It can literally clog peoples inboxes and cause distress, so it should be stopped.It’s hard to prevent spammers getting your address, but at least there is a lot of software to cope with filtering out spam emails.

One thing you can do to stop spam by yourself, is to use another  email address when you are on a social networking site, such as Facebook. Never use @ but say instead at or AT – so you would be jane.smithAT (the name of the service provider) and not jane.smith@ and then the service provider.

As some addresses are found by guessing, using characters like numbers and underscores reduces the chances.  So the software is less likely to guess jane_smith79_2@ service provider correctly.

You can also report spam to the Information Commissioner’s Office or to businesses such as Google or Yahoo who are all working to reduce the amount of  spam on the internet, but there is a long way to go before it is completely eradicated.