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The ARQ newsletter. Helpful tips for your Internet experience.

How to Avoid Spam.
By Dave Ryan
Technical Support

Spam. Many know it as an edible lunchmeat that comes in a blue tin. Many more are starting to know it as the junk email that is starting to fill their email inboxes. Chances are you may have gotten some too. Spam is unsolicited email sent by marketers trying to make a buck off of you.

According to a study done by Gartner Consulting for Brightmail.com they estimate that 25 million Spam messages are being sent every day. That comes to about 9 Billion Spams a year. This huge amount of email traffic has been known to bring down some mail servers. One of the main problems with Spam is that the brunt of the cost of dealing with it is borne by the recipients and the service providers. All it takes for a Spammer to send a million emails is an account and a list of email addresses.

You may wonder how the Spammer even got your email address. The short answer is any way they can. One of their tools is to use programs that scan web pages and news groups for email addresses. Any that are displayed are added to their list. Another way is they buy lists from places that may ask for an email address to register or access their web page, much in the same way your name gets passed around on regular mailing lists.

Here are some steps you can take to help avoid having Spam clog your inbox.

· If you visit a web site that asks for your email address, check to see if they have a privacy policy statement on their site. The policy should state that they will not share your email address with others.
· If you are going to post your email address to a discussion or news group you may want to use a second email address. This could be one the free email accounts that is available from Mail.com, Hotmail.com or others. That way the Spam won't clog your regular account.
· If you do online auctions see if the auction service offers aliases (like Ebay) so that your email address isn't posted for others to see unless they fill out a form to ask for it.

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