Every one of us deal with it – we go to check our email and, along with the messages we want from business contacts, friends and family, we download a bunch of unsolicited email advertising. Things like porn sites, medications, low-interest loans, and even the long lost secret of an adventurous love life. It’s novel at first, but after, oh, a few seconds, it’s annoying. To some, it is simply an annoyance and stays that way. You simply delete the email and move on with your life. This is the usual procedure for people who use email mainly for personal use. But, those of us with email addresses that are pretty public have this problem in a huge way. If you use your email for business, then likely your email address is on at least a few mailing lists and on people’s address books. If you have had your email address for some time, its probably gotten worse. But, on the far end of the spectrum, there are those who run internet websites and whose email addresses are very public. Large companies and internet business actually waste a lot of time and money due to this problem.

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Let’s take myself for example. On any given day, I used to download about 3,000 emails to my main email account. I would estimate that at least 90% of that is SPAM, and due to the filters I have set up, most of it is automatically placed in my “Deleted Items” folder. This amount is the result of quite a bit of work to bring the amount down, for PC Mechanic as a site receives closer to 50,000 emails every day. I, as the owner of the site, would normally receive the brunt of it. I did some configuration on the web servers to automatically delete much of it, then yet another level of server-side filters, and then yet another level of client-side filters on my local PC. So, every email goes through 3 levels of filter before it reaches my inbox, and yet I still have to delete many useless messages every day. As an aside, I would highly recommend the Cloudmark Desktop service (formerly Safetybar), from Cloudmark. It integrates with Outlook and has reduced my spam volume considerably.

Once email hit the scenes, it didn’t take long for mass marketers to recognize the usefulness of the medium. It makes its way to people’s computers and it is free. No postage. Mailing lists are collected in a variety of ways. They even have little programs that will browse the web and harvest email addresses from public websites. This is, no doubt, how my email addresses have ended up on so many mailing lists. The medium being so new, it has remained essentially uncontrolled territory for quite awhile. In 1999, there were the first attempts to propose legislation in the United States to control the problem. It went on until the passage of the CAN-SPAM Act in 2003, but the effectiveness of this legislation is certainly limited.

SPAM, then, is certainly a topic which is germane to almost everyone who reads this book. And in this course, I intend to cover the subject fairly thoroughly.

I want to answer the question of what SPAM is exactly (it’s a subject of some disagreement), who is sending it, how they get your email address, and ways you can prevent the problem. I would like to cover the subject of filtering and how you can set it up. In short, my aim is to give you the knowledge to make you have some control over SPAM rather than be the effect of it continually. It’s not a problem that you can do away with, given the nature of the internet, but it is one you can control. Read on…

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