Email is an extremely powerful business tool, and a cheap way of reaching a massive global audience. A tool quickly harnessed by some businesses for advertising purposes through unsolicited emails. It's called spam, and the longer you have been online the more spam tends to arrive in your inbox. And if your children start asking around the dinner table, what exactly is a 'teenage euro slut', you start to appreciate just how invasive spam can become.
While the volume of e-mail sent increased 14% from November 2001, to January 2002, the volume of spam increased 46%, according to a survey by anti-spam technology company Brightmail, whose clients include 8 of the 11 largest U.S. internet service providers. In January, Brightmail says, spam accounted for 11% to 26% of all e-mail traffic on the Internet. Market researchers Jupiter Media Metrix estimates that each Internet user received 571 spam messages in 2001. By 2006, it expects that number to rise to 1,500.
Email addresses are worth money, especially long lists of them. Chain letters, which ask for you to forward large numbers of email addresses, are potential sources of addresses for these lists, as are some online registration forms on websites of dubious content, which request a valid email address. Websites themselves are searched for the magic @ symbol. If your email address gets on such a list, and the list is then sold to agencies that use it for distributing spam, you can quite quickly be overwhelmed.
Spam often has a link or reply option from which you can choose to unsubscribe, or opt out, from a particular mailing list. These too should be considered carefully. If the sender has bought a large list of addresses, many may be invalid and therefore sending back an email to unsubscribe merely confirms its validity, increasing its value. These are best ignored. If however the mail has come from a reputable company, such as Fencepost.com for example, it is in their best interests to respect the wishes of their website users.
Numerous tools are at your disposal to help eliminate spam from your inbox, an effective one being the 'block senders' list. For example if you use Outlook Express 5.5 as your email programme, start by going to the Tools/Message Rules/Block Senders List, and select the Block Senders tab, and click the Add button, and add a senders address or domain name, and click OK. It's that easy to send mail from regular spam senders directly to the Deleted Items folder.
The regions only local internet service provider, Tasman Solutions of Richmond also provide an email filtering anti-spam service as an option with their Nightshade email antivirus service. Both services are also included in a Business Bundle package of services, a range of competitively priced services available to email and internet users. Details of the Business Bundle, are available from this website address, http://bb.tasman.net.
