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Introduction
Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the
message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial
advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services.
Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient
or the carriers rather than by the sender.
Email spam targets individual users with direct mail messages. Email spam lists are often
created by scanning Usenet postings, stealing Internet mailing lists, or searching the Web for
addresses. Email spams typically cost users money out-of-pocket to receive. Many people -
anyone with measured phone service - read or receive their mail while the meter is running,
so to speak. Spam costs them additional money. On top of that, it costs money for ISPs and
online services to transmit spam, and these costs are transmitted directly to subscribers.
Basic rules to avoid and minimize spam
Spammers use special programs that extract email addresses from Web sites and Usenet postings.
To avoid ending on a spammer's mailing list when you post to a Web forum or a newsgroup, you can
obscure your email address by inserting something obvious into it.
If my email address is alex@yahoo.com, I modify it to read alex@yah[delete_this]oo.com
Never reply to spam messages, even when they entice you to reply to "remove" you
from their mailing lists. Often the instructions are either bogus, or a way to collect more addresses.
Replying confirms to the spammers that your e-mail address is active, and you may receive
even more junk mail
Remove your email address from your website's pages and provide a web based mail form instead.
This way spammers can't send robots to your page to harvest email addresses and put them on
their mailing lists. Contact-Us-Online.com can provide you with such a script free of charge
If you are unix system administrator and have the mail service on your server, please read more information
about protection SMTP mail servers from spamming. For example you can find many useful information
on Unix tutorial site. Here you can find the information about
QMail Spam & Virus checking and prevention.
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