Spam

Spam is a special name for advertising in email or on the Internet. The name originally is from a special type of lunch meat made from pork, which comes in a can (see image at right). Spam was featured in a famous British comedy TV show called "Monty Python's Flying Circus"; in the show, a restaurant filled with Vikings serves many dishes, but all of them have spam in them. After the waitress recites a long menu of spam-filled dishes, the restaurant customers start singing, "Spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam!" The main character of the sketch hated spam, however. (You can watch the video here with Japanese subtitles.)

When advertising started appearing on the Internet, people remembered the Monty Python sketch and started calling the advertisements "spam." Although various types of "spam" were reported earlier, the real "spam" as we see it today started in 1994.

There are many kinds of spam, but here I will only discuss email spam. More than half of all email is spam. Advertisers often send out millions of spam messages each every day.

Luckily, most email accounts include spam filters. These are automatic programs that look for spam, and when they find it, they send it to a special junk folder. Unfortunately, the filters are not perfect. If they are too strong, they often catch real emails which you want and put them in the junk folder as well. If the filters are too weak, then too much spam gets into your main mailbox. But without any filters, then spam can flood your email account, and you could get up to a few hundred spam emails every day!

Spammers (advertisers, people who send spam) are always looking for a way to get your email address. For an advertiser, your email address = money. They will offer you nice things, they will try to trick you. They want your email address and all the email addresses they can find. It is your task to defeat them.

If you are careful and follow special rules, you can keep spam out of your email account. Here are ten rules you should follow to avoid spam:

1. Keep at least two email accounts. One will be your main email account, which you use most of the time, especially with family and friends. The other account will be your "junk" or "throwaway" account, which you will use in situations where spam is likely. For example, when you join certain web sites, they ask you to register. You are required to give a working email address; when you register, they send you a confirmation email which you can use to enter the service. The reason they ask you for your email address is because they need money. They take your email address and sell it to spammers. Perhaps a week after you register, spam starts to arrive. If you have a junk email account, you can use it for this kind of situation; the spam goes to your junk account, and not to your main account.
2. Keep your main account private. Only give it to people you know and trust. Make sure to tell them never to give your email address to other people without your permission. Remember, once the spammers get your email address, you will get spam at that address forever.
3. Tell your family and friends to use your email address only to send you email directly. There are many web sites with a "service" that suggests that you "send to a friend." Maybe there's a nice picture, a greeting card, a news story, whatever--and the web page has an option, "send this story to a friend!" They put in your email address and you get sent the story by email. The problem: after the email from your friend, you get lots of spam. A friend of mine saw a news story on the BBC, a respected news site, and he used that "tell a friend" service to send it to me. I got his email, and then just a few minutes later, I started getting spam! Also remind your family and friends never to sign you up for any service without your permission. My main email account started getting spam when a cousin of mine signed me up for a family-history service. A few weeks later, dozens of spam arrived in my email every day.
4. Don't publish your email address on the Internet. Don't put your email address on any web page, public chat, user forum, or any other public area of the Internet. Spammers have automated programs that silently scan every web page on the World Wide Web, and every public place on the Internet, looking for email addresses. Once, as an experiment, I created an new email account that nobody knew about. I put the email on a web page, but I made it invisible (I made the text color the same as the background color). No human could see it. But after just a few days, I started getting spam at that address.
5. Use a spam filter. Probably this is already turned on with your email account, but make sure. Every email software type should have a spam filter.
6. Use an anti-virus program if you use Windows. Many viruses and other malware are sent by email.
7. NEVER answer a spam email. Never click a link in a spam email. Don't even open spam email, if possible. And never, NEVER buy anything from a spammer!!
8. Do not "opt out" of spam. Some spam emails have an "opt out" link at the bottom. They claim that they sent you the spam "by mistake," or because they "thought you wanted it." So, to be "helpful," they give you a chance to tell them to stop sending spam. They tell you that if you click on the link and type your email address on the web page, they will stop sending you spam. DO NOT BELIEVE THEM. It's a trick. You see, most spam is sent to dead email accounts. The spammers don't know which email accounts are dead and which are used. If they can find out that you are using the address, they will be happy and send you more spam. If they know that you read spam, they will be very happy, and send you even more spam. If they know that you read spam and are foolish enough to "opt out," they will be extremely happy and send you tons of spam!
9. Turn off HTML graphics. Some spam includes pictures. Some of these pictures are not in the email; instead, they are on the spammer's web site. The email has HTML code which tells your email program to go to the spammer's web site, get the image, and display it in the email message. The problem: if this happens, then the spammer knows that you looked at the email! They can see which address was used, and they will start sending much more spam to that address. To turn off HTML graphics, go into the "Settings" ("preferences," or "options") of your email program/web page and try to find the option for HTML images.
10. If you use a free email service like Yahoo or Hotmail, do not choose a short email address. Spammers often send email to every possible address, starting with aaaa@yahoo.com and ending with zzzz@yahoo.com. Yes, there are millions of combinations, but spammers can easily and cheaply send millions of spam emails! However, they cannot do this with longer email addresses--there are too many combinations. That's why Google's GMail requires you to have a user name at least 6 characters long.

If you follow those ten rules from the beginning, then the chance of getting spam will be very low.

There are other strategies you might want to use. For example, get multiple email accounts, and use "forwarding." Forwarding is when an email arrives at one account, and it automatically is sent on to another email account. Let me give you an example:

Let's say I have a main email account that I want to keep secret. It is "luis@gmail.com" (not a real address). To keep the "luis" account safe, I create several other accounts: family@gmail.com, friends@gmail.com, and junk@gmail.com. In the extra accounts, I go to the "settings"page and I tell GMail to "forward" all email to "luis@gmail.com". So, all the email that is sent to "family," "friends," and "junk" is automatically sent to "luis." The "luis" account gets all my mail--but no one knows about the "luis" address!

But then, a friend breaks a rule and gives my "friends@gmail.com" address to a spammer. Spam starts to arrive at that address. Although it is forwarded to "luis," the spammers only know about the "friends" account. So I delete the "friends" account, and create a new account called "myfriends@gmail.com" and set the forwarding feature again. I give the new address to my friends. Everything is clean--and I can still keep my main account.

This is an extreme example, but you might want to have a "forwarding" account for people you don't trust 100%.