Does spam annoy you as much as it does most people? The flood of junk emails you see every day is what I mean, not the meat people in Hawaii love to eat so much.

I’m sure you’re familiar with this computer term.

These messages range from interest rates to making body parts bigger, to porn, and their numbers grow every day. Some experts estimate that junk email accounts for over 90% of all emails!

Spam is named after an old Monty Python skit which took place in a diner where you can only buy spam. A chorus keeps chanting a song about spam, drowning out conversations. Decades later, this reminded someone of how email in your inbox can get lost in all of the junk mail, so they called it spam and the name stuck.

It can be hard to avoid getting your email address on *some* list. It’s pretty typical for many to get 50 to 100 junk email in a single day – I know some people who get over 300 every day! And the problem is growing worse. 
Hapily 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 removed. Those emails may include a link or a reply address to unsubscribe, but 90% either simply don’t work, or you’re just telling the spammers that they have a live one.

*Never order anything advertised in spam, visit the website, or in any way respond to the ad. Spammers send out millions of emails at a time, and it costs them almost nothing. Every time someone orders the spammers are just encourages to send more.

*Try to avoid entering your email address on websites as much as possible. If you do, consider getting a second email account with Hotmail or a similar service. That way, you can enter that address instead of your main one.
Many websites offering contests, joke lists, free greeting cards, etc. take your email address and sell it to the highest bidder.

* Online guest books are to be avoided at all costs. 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.

* If you so much as open a junk email while you’re online, you can be instantly telling the spammer who sent it that you did. So if your email program has a “work offline” option (often found in the file menu) click it before opening suspect emails. You can also disconnect from the internet completely, but unless you are still stuck using dialup, this may involve unplugging cables. Your best option is to use the “offline” feature of your email client.
If you use a web-based email service like {Yahoo Mail, you won’t be able to go offline in this way~You can’t go offline when you use a web-based email service~It’s impossible to use web-based email services offline}. 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 applications 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 programs, 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 can be cleared from your inbox with a click. The more spam you mark, the better the program gets at automatically taking care of them. You’l be blessed with an uncluttered inbox.
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.~*Never order anything you see in junk email, click through to the website, or in any way answer the ad. It’s amazing to consider how cheap it is for the spammers to send to lists of millions of people at once, but no surprise why they do it once you realize this. The spammer will send more each time anyone orders.

*Don’t risk trying to unsubscribe or ask to be removed. Those emails may have a link or a reply address to unsubscribe, but 90% either simply don’t work, or you’re just notifying the spammers that they have a live one.

* Online guest books are to be avoided at all costs. 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.

*Try to avoid entering your email address on websites as much as possible. If you do, consider getting a second email account with Windows Live Mail or a similar service. So you have a spam-only address.
Many websites offering contests, joke lists, free greeting cards, etc. take your email address and sell it to the highest bidder.

* Simply glancing at the body of a junk email can send a signal to the spammer letting them know you opened it. So if your email application has a “work offline” setting (the file menu is a good place to look for this) click it before opening suspect emails. You can also disconnect from the internet completely, but unless you’re still stuck using dialup, this could involve unplugging wires. Generally, the best option is to use the “offline” feature of your email application.
Gmail, you won’t be able to go offline in this way~You can’t go offline when you use a web-based email service~It’s impossible to use web-based email services offline}. Check your mail options for a setting to turn off graphics in emails, or to display mail in plain text only. The wording varies from site to site, but the option to turn on will say something like “block remote images” or something similar.
These steps can help keep the spammers from knowing you’ve opened the message.

*To deal with the spam you already receive, most email applications 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 programs, 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. You can use a click to clear junk. The more spam you mark, the better the program gets at automatically taking care of them. You’ll take back your inbox.
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.

*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.}

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 free computer tips above, you’ll have a good chance of keeping it under control.