Spam

Spam. Anyone who has ever used e-mail unfortunately probably knows what spam is. Spam is what you call those annoying e-mails sent to you with advertisements for things that you don't want. They get your e-mail address in a variety of ways. Such as you sign up for something and give your e-mail address, when you just put your e-mail address onto a website such as a message board. Advertising companies will make partnerships with companies, and then when you give the website your e-mail address, they will give it to the advertising company, and you get spam. Some spammers have " mailbots" which scan the internet for e-mail addresses by looking for things characteristic of e-mail addresses, such as the "@" symbol, and ".com" or ".net" etc. However, there actually is a way to prevent this from happening. If you are familiar with JavaScript, you can make a simple script which will assemble your e-mail address without actually putting it anywhere besides in the final product. If you don't know JavaScript, you can either use this free program: Anti-Spam Software (direct link to download here sorry, for PC only) or you can type in something like "username at domain.com" instead of "username@domain.com".

There are other ways of preventing spam as well. Many ISP's will block spam serverside, meaning that the spam is stopped before it even reaches you, and you never see it.

One last way to prevent spam is by using "disposable" e-mail addresses. I will describe how one works, at this URL . First, you sign up for a (free) account. You give them another e-mail address to which the mail will be formatted. Then you make disposable addresses by picking a word and the amount of messages to be sent to that address. For instance, If I sign up for a website named randomwebsite.com which I want to send me three e-mails. I would make a disposable address in the format randomwebsite.3.username@spamgourmet.com (randomwebsite doesn't need to be in the address). I would then fill that into the form, and I would get the e-mails sent to my actual e-mail account, but after 3 had been sent I would no longer get mail from that address.

Another thing to do is to sign up for the DoNotmailList , A group of advertisers will not send you advertisements if you put your address onto the list. Of course, there is another side to the story, here is a website with the story of woman who sends advertisements (i. e. spam) to people for a living.