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‘Comment’ - Spam and how to avoid it
According to some sources (and we can well believe them) over 90% of email is now Spam. Spam is unsolicited email ranging from trying to sell you stuff (mostly drugs or online pornography) to trying to infect your machine with viruses. Pretty nasty stuff - so what can you do to try to protect yourself?
If you use a quality website hosting provider (we wouldn't recommend anything else) they should have a variety of services to help. Products, such as Spam Assassin, filter out spam emails by looking for patterns that they recognise as spam. Having this set up helps the situation greatly, but if you have a particularly bad problem then other email verification checks can be turned on to help cut the numbers further.
You should also try to guard against spam by stopping it from happening in the first place. Email harvesting programs crawl the net 24x7 gathering email addresses they find on web pages, so one option for some websites is to simply not give out an email address: instead, ask people to contact you via a form on your website. Other options exist - seek professional advice about your individual circumstances.
SPAM is a modern phenomenon driven by greed - so it is never going to go away - but with a bit of thought, careful planning and some tools to help out you can certainly reduce it to just a minor inconvenience.
Never open spam and - if you do - never click on any links within it!
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