Is spam a daily annoyance to you, too? No, I don’t mean the food, I mean the constant torrent of unwanted junk emails you get everyday.

Of course I have no doubt you’re familiar with this common computer term.

The content of the messages range from mortgage rates to enlarging various body parts, to pornography, and their numbers grow every day. Some experts estimate that spam counts for over 90% of all emails!

Spam is named after an old Monty Python sketch which took place in a diner where everything is full of spam. It’s almost impossible for people to talk as a chorus of vikings loudly sings about how wonderful spam is. Years later, the way legit emails can get lost in all the junk reminded someone, so they named it spam and the name stuck.

It can be hard to avoid getting your email address on somebody’s list. It’s pretty typical for many to receive 50 to 100 junk email in just one day – I know some people who get over 300 every day! And the problem is growing worse. 
Fortunately here are tips for someone to reduce the amount of spam they get. Here are a few tips:

*Never try to unsubscribe or ask to be taken off the list. Those emails may include a link or a reply address to unsubscribe, but most either just don’t work, or you’re just telling the spammers that they’ve got a live one.

*Never order anything you see in spam, click through to the website, or in any way answer the ad. Sending out thousands and thousands of junk emails barely costs them a thing. Even just clicking a link in one of those emails is enough to encourage them to send even more.

*Try to avoid entering your email address on websites as much as possible. If you do, consider getting a second email account with Gmail or a similar service. That way you can keep your main address private.
Many websites offering contests, joke lists, free greeting cards, etc. blast your inbox with junk mail, or sell your address to others who will.

*Never sign an online guestbook. As an experiment I recently created a new email address and entered it on about five guestbooks I found with a Google search. Within 24 hours I was getting spam, and it grew to dozens a day within a week.

* Spammers can send out special messages that “phone home” and let them know when they’re opened. So if your email client has a “work offline” setting (often found in the file menu) select it before opening suspect emails. You can also disconnect from the internet completely, but unless you are still making the mistake of using the out-of-date dialup, this could involve unplugging cables. Really, the best option is to use the “offline” feature of your email application.
If you use a web-based email service like Hotmail, You can’t go offline when you use a web-based email service. Check your mail options for a setting to turn off graphics in emails, or to display mail in plain text only. Turn on any option about blocking or not loading remote images.
These steps can help keep the spammers from knowing you’ve opened the message.

*Avoid forwarding emails to large numbers of people.
Not everyone realizes that when you forward a message, the email addresses of everyone who receives the message is visible to every person who reads it. If any of the recipients is a spammer, or if one of a friend’s computer is infected by certain viruses, they can harvest all of those addresses, including yours.
If you do send an email to multiple people, you can avoid revealing email addresses by entering addresses in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) area instead of To or CC. This will hide the list of addresses from everyone else.
If you’re sending a message from somebody on to others, you should copy and paste just the message into a new email window rather than hitting the forward button — this trims the message down and protects the privacy of others.

*To deal with the spam you already receive, most email clients allow you to create “filters” or “rules” that move incoming email into a specified folder or even right into the trash.
Setting filters up can be complicated, but the newer versions of many email applications, including Mozilla Thunderbird and Mac OS X Mail make it much easier.
The programs recognize patterns in spam, and use your address book as a white list of legit senders. Junk that shows up can be marked as spam with a click. The more spam you mark, the better the program gets at automatically taking care of them. Your inbox will end up much less full of junk.
Many internet providers also provide a spam filter which blocks email before it gets to your computer. The problem with this is that they often block legitimate mail and you may never know about it.
Because of this, I recommend using filtering software on your own computer, such as the two programs I just mentioned.

Ultimately, spam is a fact of modern life, and it’s next to impossible to avoid all of it, mostly because of what other people are doing with your email. If your current email address is about to collapse from the amount of spam you get, you might be forced to get a new one.

After that, if you follow the suggestions and computer tips above, you’ll have a good chance of keeping it under control. While a written article can never fully replace something visual such as computer training cds I hope you found it helpful.