Mirror Magazine

I get dozens of emails each day from people I do not know. Most of those emails are advertisements for products ranging from computers to Viagra. I have not subscribed to receive such emails, and I believe I am a victim of Spam emails. I replied to their senders requesting them not to send me emails, but the spam has not stopped. What can I do?

Personally, I don’t mind spam email. As you say, they at least carry worthwhile advertisements about cheap computer deals, and remind their older recipients from time to time that the fountains of youth do not necessarily have to dry up with old age (surely my neighbour would love spam email!). The real pain as far as I am concerned is forwards from friends with mushy verses and pink flowers. The worst thing about forwards is that virtually every forward has a digital curse attached to it at the bottom, threatening that I will suffer bad luck in relationships or fall off a 100-storey building into a pile of steaming fresh dung and then be attacked by a mad goat – if I don’t forward it to another 10 million people in my address book in two minutes! As a result of not forwarding such emails, I have actually brought upon myself a curse that makes girls turn me down even before I ask them out!

But as for your question, I can imagine how embarrassed you would have been when your friend looked over your shoulder and saw you staring at a Viagra ad! Spam not only causes humiliation, but also costs organisations money in terms of network bandwidth and wasted employee time. Some spammers just guess email addresses and mail out their junk. Others pick up email addresses from websites, where people may have posted them. They could also gather email addresses from forwarded emails! Why do they bother? Well, active email addresses are worth their weight in gold in cyberspace… err... maybe not gold… but you get the picture, right? There are those who hunt for valid email addresses, and sell them to spammers and scammers in exchange for actual banknotes! People have designed software robots that can harvest email addresses that are published on web pages and forums.

So here’s what you can do. Never reply a spam email. This only confirms to the spammer that your’s is an active user, and only increases the value of your email address to be traded for an even higher price. In fact, do not reply any email from a suspicious stranger – especially if it involves money or personal contact. If the deal is too good to be true, it most probably is! Never post your plain email address on a website. Instead, embed your email address in the HTML like <a href=”mailto:your_email_address”>Email me</a> which makes it a bit more difficult for bots to pick them up. Also refrain from forwarding emails with all the previous email addresses in them. If you must forward an email to your entire address book (for the lack of originality and creativity, or for the sadistic pleasure of watching helpless recipients scrolling through hoards of junk), copy the contents of the message into a new mail message and mail it – and encourage your friends to do the same. Another trick that spammers employ to find out whether your email address is valid is to send pictures in the body of the email. When you open or download the email, pictures in the message body automatically get downloaded from a remote website (pictures that are sent as attachments have to download, usually by clicking on them). This lets the spammer know that your email address is active. Web email clients, such as Gmail (Google Mail), however, have protection against this scheme, and usually ask for confirmation from the user before images in the email body are downloaded.

Firewalls and antivirus software cannot protect you from spam email. Your ISP should be taking the trouble to filter out the spam for you as much as possible, too bad it doesn’t care enough to do that. The latest versions of MS Outlook have in-built Spam filters, but how effective they can be depends on how much you help it out. All you can do is take measures to minimise the exposure of your email address other than to people you want to hear from. Err… and if you are thinking about how you could possibly ever repay me for the invaluable advice that I have so freely bestowed on you, you could start by finding jobs for all the jobless people who inflict misery on others by forwarding emails!