Most of us take email for granted. We just turn on our computers, click on the ‘ol email icon and bingo! it loads and shows us all the wonderful emails from friends all over the world. You know the ones…from the friendly guy at the drug company always looking out for you, the stock market guys, the friends you have in the “red light” district, etc. Yep, simple stuff.

But how the heck did we get all these new “friends” anyway?

Well, many ways actually. Some of them include using one email address for just about everything, one that got sold to a 3rd party for marketing purposes, someone’s PC got hacked and your email address harvested, spyware…the list can go on.

We have many ways to rid ourselves of spam or at the very least, cut it down to a level that’s manageable. But, what exactly IS spam?

According to Wikipedia:

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, undesired bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is 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 no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is 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. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.

Ok, now that we know just what it is…how do we rid ourselves of it?

There is an excellent book that talks about the spam issue and ways to prevent it. Brian McWilliams book “sets out to answer in a new book, “Spam Kings: The Real Story Behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements.” McWilliams tells the stories of some of the Internet’s most hard-core spammers and the equally hard-core spam hunters seeking to expose them.” More information about this book can be found here.

More tips on how to prevent spam in your inbox from Susan Tenby, Online Community Manager at TechSoup:

1. Never, ever reply to a spam message: This includes buying a product that is for sale or clicking the often-misunderstood ?unsubscribe? link, which actually informs your spammer that you exist. If you can tell from the subject line that a message is spam, don’t open it, delete it. Spam subject lines usually promise you a better sex life, a more youthful appearance, prescription drugs without a doctor?s approval, love, thicker hair, or a better mortgage rate. They also use attention-demanding punctuation, such as exclamation marks or all caps.
2. Don?t click any links in a spam e-mail: Spammers often have multiple, unique pages on their sites. Often times, when you click a URL in a spam message, this tells the spammer that you — and only you — received the message they sent.
3. Disguise your e-mail addy: Don’t put your e-mail address in plain text on your Web site. An effective way to trick the spiders that traverse the Web to harvest e-mail addresses is to disguise your e-mail address by stripping out periods and “@” symbols. For example, “YOURNAME AT YAHOO DOT COM” or use JavaScript to display your e-mail address as a clickable link. Inter-linked.com shows you how to do it. You can also make the “@” an image which will prevent crawlers from identifying it.
4. Don?t forward an e-mail from someone you don?t know to a list of people: You remember those ?forward this e-mail to 20 of your friends? messages? They are perfect for spammers to harvest e-mail addresses, even if the sender of the original e-mail did not have this intent. These types of sign-and-forward e-mails often appear in the form of a petition — and they don?t work.
5. If you have your own domain: don’t use your regular e-mail address when you register at Web sites. Instead, create a separate e-mail address for each site where you register, like this: sitename@yourdomain.com. That way, you’ll know who’s selling your e-mail address and can either block or delete it if it starts generating spam.
6. Create disposable e-mail addresses: There are now services, such as Sneakemail.com that allow you to create multiple ?disposable? addresses that point to your real one. A good plan is to create a different disposable address for each Web site or newsgroup in which you participate. If one address becomes problematically spammish, you can simply dispose of that one and still keep the rest.
7. Don?t use your home or business e-mail address: when you register on a Web site or in a group. If you must sign up for services, want to receive more info, register for newspapers or domains; use a free e-mail address from a site like Yahoo to create an address especially for that purpose. This also goes for posting to the Web, in a listserv, newsgroup, on a contact page for a Web site, or on a resume that is posted on the Web.
8. Before you join a list: make sure the list owner or Web master will not sell your address.
9. Preview your messages: before you open them. Outlook (and many other e-mail clients) let you use a preview mode to peek at the contents of a message before you actually open it. To do this in Outlook, go the View menu and select Preview Pane. Instead of double clicking a message, click it once to select it and you’ll see the message displayed in the Preview Pane.
10. View a message’s headers to see if a sender’s e-mail address is valid: In Outlook, you can do this by right-clicking the message and selecting Options. (Note that full message headers are usually hidden by default in most e-mail clients.) In the header information you can see if the return address is indeed the address it claims to be. You can also see information about the servers that passed the e-mail along to you. It may take looking at several headers to get a real feeling of what to look for, but the biggest tip-off is when the return address isn?t the same as the domain of the organization it that claims to be the recipient or if the return address is yours. Spammers usually falsify this information.
11. Don’t use Hotmail/ AOL/ MSN as your primary mail provider: That’s because spammers often flood common usernames on widely-used mail systems (e.g. dave23, dave24, etc.). If your main e-mail address is currently on Hotmail, MSN, AOL, Earthlink, or any other major national mail provider, you may want to think about getting a less visible e-mail address to minimize your exposure to spam. Read more about why not to use a free, commercial e-mail address as your primary address in this TechSoup article on How to Deal with Spam.
12. Use complicated e-mail addresses: Spammers’ software will look for the easy and obvious addresses first.
13. Use a spam filter: One to try is SpamBayes for Windows, which you can find in our Free Downloads section. Another is Mailshell, which is available on TechSoup Stock. (Visit the Mailshell page for details).
14. If you work in an office: forward spam to your IT department so they can adjust the filters.
15. Read all your messages as text: That means turning off the ability to view pictures, HTML, movies, and formatted text, which most spam contains).
16. Use a Web-posting form: on your Web site to allow users to contact you. For information on how to do this, read the TechSoup Virus Vaccination Forum - How to get SPAM?? post.
17. Make sure your privacy settings are set so you don’t receive marketing: from other sites in your AOL and Yahoo profiles. Many listservs use Yahoo lists as the list provider, you must unselect these pre-selected choices, in your personal privacy settings.
18. Never use your e-mail address as your screen name: in chat rooms. It will give spiders or human e-mail harvesters an absolute yes to a questionable e-mail address.
19. Throw in a little HTML or spacing that is undetectable to crawlers: when posting your e-mail address on a Web site. This Network World newsletter offers some practical advice on this topic.
20. Don?t give your real address to a Web site for registration: If you must register with a real e-mail address, make sure you can opt out of receiving unsolicited e-mail from the site where you’re registering. If you are unsure about this, read the site’s privacy statement.

For now, let’s assume first that you have an email account with your ISP (internet service provider) and it’s pretty much the only one you’ve had for quite some time. I’ll bet it’s getting it’s share of spam by now, right?

As this is the only email account you have and you’d like to keep it, there are a few ways to get that inbox back in decent shape. It won’t be easy but it can be done.

There are services out there that specialize in spam prevention. Some are included with internet security software that you can buy either online or at a local electronics store (or even Wal-Mart).

One of these is Trend Micro and can be bought online. Trend Micro has an excellent spam prevention feature that can be read about here.

There are others but seeing as I use the Trend Micro PCCillin suite of anti-virus, spyware, firewall, etc., I can’t comment on them. However, there are services out there that work by utilizing the challenge concept.

Let’s say I send you an email (about my blog for example) and you’re using one of these challenging services. Before you get the email yourself, the service will challenge me by sending me an email with a verification code in it. Actually, it’s an image with letters and numbers in it that a spambot cannot read. Only the human eye can see it.

I enter the code that is in the image and select send or submit…viola! You will now get the email and I’ll automatically be entered as a trusted email address. Cool, huh? You want to know where to find a service like this?

There are plenty of them but Gafana is one that I’ve used and have been plenty pleased by it. You can even use it for your AOL, Yahoo, MSN or pretty much any email accounts. It works great too.

Yahoo even has a feature that allows you to create what they call AddressGuard. This allows you to create and manage disposable email addresses to defend your primary address against spam.

To close, there are plenty of ways to combat spam. You just have to keep at it to take your inbox back from the spammers. I hope this has been of some use to those of you that visited.