Everybody Hates Spam! How To Deal With It

Spam is the bane of Internet users, and the unsolicited advertisements that constitute spam clog up mailboxes worldwide. The most occasional or casual e-mail user will know of the time-consuming frustration of spam, in which a quick check of one’s e-mail turns into a time-consuming process of sorting through get rich quick schemes, enticements for romantic encounters and male enhancement pills.

The World’s First Spam

A law firm in Arizona handling immigration is popularly known as having sent the first unsolicited mass commercial message over USENET in 1994. The message is known as the “green card spam” and despite a huge backlash, the spammers remained unrepentant. Since then, of course, the amount of spam online has only exploded.

The Costs Of Spam

It is clear that spammers transfer the cost of advertising from themselves to others. One government study estimated the cost of spam to US organizations at a whopping $10 billion a year and growing. The cost is not only in terms of lost productivity, but money that must be spent to purchase hardware to handle the volume of incoming messages, as well as software and staff that must deal with spam.

Spam accounts for the majority of e-mail traffic, with studies estimating the number of spam messages sent worldwide at 55 billion every day! In fact, spam accounts for up to 85% of all e-mail messages.

Spam wastes our time and makes our lives more difficult. It requires us to sift through our inboxes to differentiate legitimate and important e-mails from badly-worded messages trying to hawk  the latest fad medicines.

If spam doesn’t seem that bad to you, then it is likely only because your ISP filters much of it out for you before it even reaches your inbox (which leads to higher ISP costs). Certainly, if you run one or more websites, participate in social networking or do any kind of marketing online, you will be the recipient of much more spam.

Making a Profit with Spam

Despite the universal contempt for spam, it must still be profitable or it would not be so prevalent. Although you and most other people would never respond to spam, it doesn’t matter. Because it is so cheap to send out, only a tiny fraction of recipients need to respond in order for the spammer to make a profit.

Although you don’t want these messages and would never respond to them, spammers use various tricks, such as sending out each message from a different throwaway e-mail address, to make it virtually impossible for you to block them.

It is important to differentiate spam from legitimate advertising e-mail. Some people may consider messages to be spam that they had in fact signed up for, perhaps to receive some sort of free product, and had forgotten doing so. This considerably complicates the issue of eliminating spam.

Dealing with Spam

The best way to deal with spam is to use a special e-mail address for receiving offers. Also, you can set your e-mail program to filter out a great deal of spam. For example, Apple’s Mail contains smart algorithms to help analyze mail and determine which messages are most likely to be junk. It then either highlights these messages or moves them to a junk mailbox, depending on your preferences.

Apple Mail has a special training mode that will simply flag messages suspected of being spam until you’re confident with its level of accuracy. Then you can have spam messages sent to a special spam folder. To help Mail do its job, it is important to mark each spam message received as spam by clicking the “junk” button in the toolbar.

If Apple Mail’s built-in spam filters are not adequate to your needs, there are a number of third-party spam fighting programs that you can purchase for more comprehensive spam detection capabilities.

No matter what option you use, you will still want to check your spam folder from time to time to make sure that no legitimate messages got filtered out by mistake. However, this process will be much faster than it would be if most of the spam messages were interspersed with your legitimate e-mail.

Although spam will always be an annoyance, a little diligence on your part will help to keep it manageable.