What is Spam

Spam is a term which refers to unsolicited commercial email, it can also be referred to as junk mail. The problem is very widespread and has got much news coverage in the past few years. Spammers are typically selling a product or service, I'm sure your all familiar with messages like 'get rich quick', bank scams, health products, porn sites, fake id/degrees, spy products, virus warnings etc, the list could go on and on. Spammers operate because it is so cost effienent for them, unlike conventional mail, it doesn't matter if only 1 in a few thousand respond, it's still enough for them to make a profit. It's unbelievable how sad some people are to have to sink to these levels, they simply don't care about you or the time you'll waste having to delete it. They also don't care about sending offensive messages, what's even worse is some spammers try to trick you by not making it appear as if it is not an advert, tricks like this in the subject line '[your username] : Important Info' or 'Account Cancelled'. They do this because most people don't want spam and therefore don't open the messages. Spammers don't like your choice and don't respect your time so they'll do anything to trick you into believing that it's an important email. Billions of spam is sent each day costing people millions, slowing down the Internet (because each message sent normally travels through numerous systems before reaching its destination) and wasting people time, and also very annoying.

So how do I avoid it then


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Spam : Further Info on Adoko


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Spam : Links
http://spam.abuse.net/ - An excellent site for reporting spam.
http://www.cauce.org/ - Highly popular site and famous site.
http://www.euro.cauce.org/ - European version of the above site.
http://www.samspade.org/ - Offers many tools to investigate spam and to help trace spammers.
http://www.stopspam.org/ - Very useful site, with interesting info about reading the headers to try and trace the spam.
http://www.spamcon.org/ - Another good anti-spam site.
Remove Windows Messager - Windows Messager allows spam pop-up windows to appear on your system. Here are instructions on how to remove messenger.



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