What Is Spam?

People often refer to spam as “unsolicited email” but this is not entirely accurate. Although all spam is unsolicited, all unsolicited email is not spam. For example, if you suddenly get an email from your old high school buddy who you haven’t heard from in 10 years this email would be unsolicited but would hardly be spam.

I think it might be more accurate to say that spam is “unsolicited commercial email” as these emails usually want to get your money in one way or another. Typically they are emails that have an advertisement inside to buy some product like pharmaceuticals or visit a casino site. Some are outright scams that prey on those naive enough to believe that someone from Nigeria is going to send you a million dollars if you will only give them your bank account number so they can transfer some funds out of the country.

What Spam Looks Like

Usually the emails are from some fake looking name and many of them may have subjects that try to lure you into opening them by promising a stock tip, pretending to be your friend or acting like they need information for an application that you never filled out. When you get an email like this that seems suspicious it is best to just delete it.

How Spammers Get Your Email

Most likely at one time or anther you filled out a form, posted to a forum or joined an email list where you had to list your email address. Your address may have been harvested by robots that crawl the web looking for email addresses or it could have been sold to an email list used by spammers.

Unfortunately, once your email address is out there it will circulate for ever. There is no point in replying to the spam or trying to use the unsubscribe button as the spammer has no intention of removing you from his list and in fact, by acknowledging that you received his email you are giving him incentive to send you more mail and possibly sell your email address to other spammers. Your best defense is to get a good filtering software and filter out as much of it as you can.