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"Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, undesired bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, and mobile phone messaging spam. Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have effectively no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it has proved difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions."

Information Source: wikipedia.org

• Do not post your email address on publicly accessible websites, chat groups or other areas where they may be easily harvested by automated tools.
  
  If you must post your email address use special characters to disguise your real address such as:
  myaddress{at}mydomain.com
  If you really want to make sure your address is not automatically harvested, create a small .jpg or .gif file with your address in it and save it as an image such as:
  
  
  
• ABSOLUTELY NEVER reply to a "remove this address" link in a spam. This will only guarantee that you will start receiving tons of spam. It's almost certain, that once you respond to one of these requests your verified address will be sold to other spammers!
  
  
• Use "throw away" email addresses. Almost every provider allows you to create more than one email address in addition to your primary one. If your provider does not offer this service, there are other FREE services such as Google and Yahoo that offer free email accounts that can also be used for this purpose.
  
  When this address starts getting too much spam sent to it, simply notify those you want to have the new address and delete the old one.
  
  
• Never use your primary email address for anything other than accessing your account. Your main email address should ALWAYS be kept private. Keep in mind however, that this alone will not guarantee that you will not receive spam. If enough random addresses are tried eventually your address will receive spam. If you follow the tips here, your problem should not get worse.
  
  
• NEVER open the contents of an email from an unknown source (see next item). Aside from exposing your computer to viruses, opening an email from a spammer can only validate your email address for them. Many spammers include a picture with a unique name that they can tie back to your email address. When you open that email, and display that image, you have just told the spammer that he has found a valid address.
  
  
• Never allow your email program to automatically preview your messages (see previous item). You can always use the "Properties" function to look at the header and see where the message is coming from. After a while, you will be able to identify spam just by looking at the headers and simply delete them.
  
  
• Chain letters/mail lists are also something to be avoided. Many times spammers will place a small program within the html file that delivers the body of a cute joke, interesting picture or other item of interest. Every time you forward that, your email address along with that of everyone you so thoughtfully forwarded the message to is now on the spammers list. While it might be nice to let someone know you are thinking about them, all you really succeed in doing is helping the spammer obtain additional valid addresses.
  
  
• If your ISP offers a tool for detecting spam, by all means use it. If you are unsure as how to set it up, contact your ISP ( not me!) using their published help address or telephone number and request help. Not only will you receive less spam by doing this, but you will also help your ISP by identifying the domain names of where the spam is originating to further reduce the spam everyone gets.

Spam on navymars.org - While every effor is made to reduce the amount of spam that we ALL receive, spammers are a smart lot. The very nature of our email system encourages spam. All one has to do is start at NNN0AAA and run through NNN0ZZZ and they hit everyone of us. Patterns like this are easily spotted and exploited. All we can do to thwart this is through the use of filters and whitelists/blacklists. The problem is if our filters are too tight, we start to lose real emails and if they are not tight enough, we start getting spam. The trick is to walk that fine line between the two.

While this by no means is an exhaustive list, the items listed here should help in reducing the amount of spam you receive, NOTHING.... I REPEAT.... NOTHING will ever stop all of it. Spammers continualy are figuring out new ways of targeting us and circumventing our defenses. The only sure fire way not to get any spam, is not to have an email address!

© 2006 NAVMARCORP Mars