| What is spam? Spam is when businesses e-mail you (and
a BUNCH of other people) without you asking for
information about their company or products. It's
basically junk mail for your e-mail. So.. why is it such
a problem? Some people pay for each minute they're
online. This means that they're spending money to read
their e-mail. More emails in a mailbox means it takes
more time to load and thus is costing them money! Plus,
it takes time out of their busy schedules to read and
delete these notes! What, that's not enough reason? How
about -this-! When spammers (the idiots who send spam)
send out mail, they send it out to hundreds, even
THOUSANDS! of people at once! All this junk-mail being
sent through computers and servers takes up memory and
server resources. To compensate, the servers charge YOU
more money for the resources that SPAMMERS are using.
Spam hurts you where you feel it most, in the wallet! |
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| What can you do? |
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| 1. Well, you can reply and "unsubscribe" to
a list you never even subscribed to in the first place!
This is not recommended because then you show your e-mail
is active. |
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| 2. You can report them to your server (aol, prodigy,
msn, etc..) or even their server. The problem is,
spammers don't always use their real e-address, so
tracking them down by e-mail is extremely difficult! |
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| 3. If you have a web site, "munge" your
e-mail address. If your email is John_Smith@dingo.com,change
it to John_Smith@ding.com
and let your viewers know what needs to be changed.
Spammers have computers that not only pick up on any
links you have, but now also have computers that search
for hidden addresses as well as search the text
of a page for addresses! So make sure that you don't type
your full and true address out on your web page. |
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| 4. Set spam-traps. Some people put fake links all
over their websites. This can get confusing for some
innocent human readers if this is poorly done. |
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| 5. Fight back. (evil laughter) One little code has a
pretty good chance of making spammers' modems hang up if
they try sending mail to someone who's put this nasty
little code in their fake e-mail address. +++ATHO. There
are also alot of other things you can do, as well, but
I'll leave that to the other anti-spam pages. |
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| 6. Report them. Again, tracking them my be difficult,
but these agencies can do it! |
