You’ve Got Spam: How many of us are victims of our email address being spam? I am sure all most everyone will say that spam is apart of our daily life. There was a time that I had to spend about an hour each day just to go through and clean my personal emails and my business emails. Yes, a total waste of my precious time, which could be used to do something more useful and constructive. I do however, filter a lot of these emails that go to my junk file but, it always seem that these spammers are using several tactics to get to you at all costs.

Why it is so Difficult to Eradicate
Unsubscribing from a Spam Email List
One conniving trick that some spammer use is, after you receive their unsolicited emails, they provide an option for you to unsubscribe or send an email for removal. They will ask you to do any of the following: click a link for automatic removal, go to a website to type in your email that you want to remove or send a reply with the word “ remove” or “unsubscribe” in the email subject area. So what’s the trick? When you carry out any of these procedures you are actually confirming your email address is active and valid therefore, allowing them to send you more junk!! Don’t even waste your time sending them an email expressing your anger of how you want to take your keyboard and hit them across their heads (just to say it mild) because you will be only (to their amusement) confirming your email address. Some other strategies used by them are creating several email addresses and using adapting spam software that is very evasive to counteract most anti spam arsenal out there.

Sophisticated Softwares That Adapt
Spammers are always developing very sophisticated software to adapt and counteract anti-spam software provided by software engineering companies fighting these spammers. This makes it difficult to get rid of them and make it seem that they will always coexist and evolve together. Web hosting companies and ISP need also to play a much active zero tolerance roles to these sites that spam. Report any site spamming you to their hosting and their internet service provider.

Avoid Spam Scams
Responding to Spam Emails
Apart from this, some of us are to be blamed for it. There are some of us who buy anything that they see advertised in spam they receive and causing all of us to suffer because of this. What this does is encouraging them to continue this act because it pays and this is one of several reasons why it is very difficult to get rid of. Just think about it, if they were not making money (profit) they wouldn’t be doing it in the first place. Along with this spam it is very cheap to distribute. Not everyone will buy what they are offering but lets take a close look at the profit that can be made. If one customer in every 50,000 or even a100, 000 emails sent, buy something that may cost let say, $5 to $30 would be a great profit margin for just spending a dollar or so to distribute these email offerings. Therefore sending bulk emails out to thousand of victims who they see as potential customers work for them, the spammers.


Some of these offerings sent by spam are very appealing to the person that fall victim to these emails because they seems to be the answer to their daily problems, needs, wants and creed. The main offer that I found being distributed is business opportunities. They know most people are not happy with the job that they are presently doing and some just need the extra income to make ends meet or just to enjoy the finer things in life. Nothing is wrong with that but the problem is that most of these are scams. So you are both spammed and scammed.

Some of these spam that you receive in your email usually offer the following: Business opportunities, work-at-home schemes, diploma mills offers, dating services, health and diet, guaranteed loans or credit, credit repair, free product offers, get-rich-quick schemes, Adult Entertainment, pharmacy drugs, vacation prize promotions and weight lost programs just to name a few. Do you see why some of us fall victim to these offers? Need I say more?

One of the Main Reason for Spamming
Increasing traffic means potentially making large profit
Spamming for their Website popularity to build profit by increasing traffic by links some of these spammers use harvesting software to get your email address on the Internet. They also spam in different ways for the same reason - to make money or, should I say, to make a very large profit. They also spam business emails addresses; search engines submit forms with several of their site url for submission and directories; web log (or blogs); newsgroup posting, guest books; and online discussion boards to name a few. They fill guest books and discussion boards with several links to their Website so as to increase traffic and build their link popularity on the Internet to get artificial high page rank hence ranking high in Google, Yahoo and MSN searches. They also use keywords in these links also to improve their ranking and use several redirect URL names that point to their spam-advertised site.

Some Ways How to Prevent, Stop or Reduce Spam
-Stopping Spam

Here are some tips you can use to help prevent your email being harvested by spammers:

1. Use a separate email address and another for your general public use.

2. For business: Use disposable emails addresses to submit to directories esp. the free ones, search engines, forums and ads sites or any public posting that on the internet.

3. For personal emails use disposable emails addresses for forums or any other public posting sites. Any Website that displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors of an email address may be also a target for spam.

4. Make your email address a unique one, containing both letters and numbers.

5. Check the privacy policy of a website that you are submitting your email address to. This could be for websites submissions for businesses or personal website, a purchasing transaction or a membership site or any other sites that needs you email address. Some of them do sell your email addresses to spammers.

6. Do not buy any product or pay for any services that are offered to you, no matter how tempting it is. Simple delete the message and use your filter to classify all emails from this unsolicited address as spam or junk.

7. Use email provider that have email anti spam filters. One problem though using email anti spam filters, is that a lot of solicited email addresses fall in this filter trap and goes straight to the junk file especially, if you sign up for a newsletter or other such online transaction that will send you an email for confirmation or for any other reasons. Some of this anti-spam software can however, be “trained” over a period of time to recognize and remove these emails addresses. One way to prevent emails going to the junk, is adding all your contacts to your contact list in your email account.

8. If you own a website or blog, do not place your email address or an hyperlink email address on your website in its original form. For example, if your email address is myname@hotmail.com or myname@yoursitename.com, change the email address to myname [at] hotmail [dot] com or myname [at] yoursitename [dot] com. The person reading it should change the words in the bracket to its appropriate symbols before sending an email. This is done to prevent spamming from spam bots that roam the internet searching for sites to harvest their email addresses. These spam bots are send out by the spammer (the person).

There are other creative ways that you can use to present your email address online that will prevent any spam bot harvesting the email address that they will pass on to the spammer. For example, adding the word “remove this” in your email address (mynameremovethis@hotmail.com). However, you should let your readers know that they should remove this part because they will send email to that address.

Report Spam Scam
Report spam emails to the Federal Trade Commission by sending them a copy of such scam to: spam@uce.gov. These emails that are sent to FTC are stored in there data system so that legal action can be taken against these spammers and scammers.

There is a lot of spam software out there on the internet that you can purchase or get for free by downloading it from their sites. Cloudmark Desktop is a proven solution that automatically fights spam, fraud and all email threats. There is a 30-day trial before you purchase.