I’ve heard estimates that up to 80% of the daily email traffic is SPAM of some sort. SPAM stands for Self Promotional Advertising Method. Canter and Siegel, a husband-and-wife law firm, started this nightmare with a pitch to help immigrants to apply for a current government program called the Green Card Lottery in a Usenet newsgroup around April of 1994.

Even then this caused an absolute outcry for the two to be lynched. But, alas, that never happened and here we are today dealing with an avalanche of unwanted email every day.

I really don’t mind some legitimate company sending me something that I might have an interest in buying. I am on many email lists for companies I do buy from whom send me new offers and information I want. But receiving 100’s of unsolicited offers for crap is not a good thing.

But there are some good options that you have to help slow this unending surge of absolute worthless stream of emails. We have three software packages that can help you deal with SPAM (SpamBayes, SpamPal, and MailWasher). They are listed in the Internet Category.

If you use some version of Outlook (this includes the free version of Outlook Express), there is a website here that gives a step by step method with screen shots for each version to filter out SPAM:

http://www.sitedeveloper.ws/tutorials/spam.htm

And we have some recommendations below on how to help you keep from getting SPAM or in some cases more SPAM. Most of these are common sense but it never hurts to say it one more time =8~).

• If you have a website, most have a feature to kill known SPAM at the server. If you don’t know how, ask your hosting provider.
• If you are inundated with SPAM right now, don't hesitate to change your email address. I know it's a pain but sometimes it's the best path to take for a fresh start. Keep both emails live until you are satisfied that every one you want has the new email address.
• Never even open suspicious emails, they can have the ability to run a program upon opening. That goes double for any attachments.
• Get a throw away email address to use for temporary email. Use one you can change often.
  ( go here to get one: http://www.mailinator.com/ )
• Never give your primary email address out unless you know the requester.
• Never click on any link to unsubscribe in what you consider SPAM, it’s normally used to confirm your address not unsubscribe you – then you get put on every SPAM list in the world.
• Keep your anti-virus software current. Make sure you have an automatic update feature activated.