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Spam is a fact of life on the Internet. It's all those rubbish e-mails that come in offering anything from improved bodily functions to employment in obscure companies that probably don't exist, or advising that you are a beneficiary in the will of some Nigerian nabob. We can't get away from spam altogether but it's possible to minimise the amount that turns up in our mail boxes.
The term comes from perhaps the most annoying Monty Python sketch ever filmed. It's set in a cafe where every item on the menu contains single or multiple servings of spam. Click on the link if you want to see it—it plays for a little over three minutes.
The more you supply your email address on the web, the more spam you will receive. In my own case I've had quite a lot of exposure as Webmaster for several sites and information contact for another, and until recently the amount of spam I received was almost overwhelming. On a good week I'd get 200+ but most weeks it would be in the 500-700 range. That no longer happens.
There are a couple of things you can do.
First, contact your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and find out if they have a spam filter. I've been with TPG since first connecting to the Internet about eight years ago and their policy is that they don't activate a spam filter on your account unless you request it. I'll explain why in the next paragraph. The filter catches everything they think is spam—as well as odds and ends that are not!—and stores them in a cache on the ISP's own server. After they have been stored for a given time (ten days or 100 messages in my case) they send me an e-mail advising that they are there. That's my cue to go in and check them to make sure nothing important has been accidentally included. Then I can redirect anything I want to my inbox and delete the rest with one click.
The reason that the filter isn't activated automatically on everybody's account is that occasionally a genuine message slips through to the spam filter. I'm happy to winkle them out when necessary as the lesser evil, but many people would complain about the mis-delivery. Ergo, if you don't ask for it you don't get it.
There are facilities within the filter to nominate any e-mail address from which you want to receive messages, as well as nominating any you want to avoid. This largely avoids the problem of lost mail.
When you subscribe to special-interest newsletters you have no way of knowing whether your address will be passed to spammers. My own experience is that most do not, but there are some that do. Reputedly, the most notorious sources of spam, spy ware and viruses are porn and humour sites.
Sometimes when you want to browse a site you will be asked to register first. That means they will want a name (I generally use Dozy) and an e-mail address. With many sites they then send a confirmation e-mail to the address you supplied to confirm that you are a genuine person. I've registered with quite a few sites around the Net—mostly either chess sites or the news media—and am happy to supply those details. On the other hand, if it's a site I've found while Googling for information I don't feel obliged to do that. That's where SpamGourmet comes into its own.
SpamGourmet owes its existence to our need to maintain an element of privacy. It works like this. Register an account with SpamGourmet using a user name and your genuine e-mail address. My user name is Dozy (don't ask, it's a long story) and if I don't want to reveal my address on any particular site I register as "anything.dozy@spamgourmet.com". I can nominate how long that address will remain in existence (three days is the default) and during that time any emails—spam or otherwise—from my new-interest site will be passed to my In Box. After three days the address ceases to exist. There is no limit to the number of addresses I can use concurrently on SpamGourmet.
Fortunately, TPG appears to have become more proficient at blocking spam and now the filter has to be cleared only once every ten days, and even then with less than 25 messages in it. Of course spammers are pretty inventive and they find ways to by-pass the filters but, even so, only a few get to my In Box each day.