The Golden Rule to help Prevent SPAM emails

The Golden Rule to help Prevent SPAM emails
Never reply to a SPAM email

SPAM emails will almost always invite you to unsubscribe from their mailing list. This is a way for them to confirm your email address is real. It will offer a link, or it will say something like 'Reply to this email with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject', never do it.

In this guide we will give you some general tips about how you can try and minimise these nuisance SPAM emails. We will also look at how you can help stop spammers by reporting the SPAM emails you receive.
Some basics about SPAM emails.
What is a SPAM email?
* A SPAM Email is an unsolicited commercial email, in other words, an email trying to sell you something which you haven't requested.

Some SPAM Emails appear to come from trusted sites ?
* This is called email spoofing, in these cases the spammer's apparent email address will be a trusted domain name. The only way to really see where the email has come from is by viewing the full header information of the SPAM email.

How can I report SPAM emails ?
* To actively do something about the SPAM problem by reporting any SPAM emails you receive, there are different ways to go about it depending on where you live.

Where do they get my email address from?
* Spammers get email addresses by various methods, the most common are listed below:

Dictionary attacks
* Some spammers use software to randomly generate email addresses for popular email providers. Commonly called dictionary attacks, the software will guess the first part of an email address: guessed@emailprovider.com

Purchasing third party lists
* Buying email addresses from third parties. To avoid this only give your email address to trusted sites.

Email Harvesters
* Some spammers use special software called email harvesters which scan webpages for email addresses. Common targets for email harvesters are message boards and social networking websites.

To avoid your email being picked up by this type of software, when including your email address on a webpage (for example when you use a message board) try to obscure it. For example, use john AT yourprovider.com instead of using the @ symbol.