Tips for Dealing with Unwanted Email or Spam

Electronic mail, or e-mail, has become a fast, cheap, effective and fun way to communicate, exchange important documents, and even send friends and family pictures of a new baby or a recent vacation.  But electronic junk mail, or "spam," can take a lot of the fun and convenience of E-mailing.  These tips can help reduce or avoid spam problems:

• The best way to prevent spam from arriving in the first place is to protect your e-mail address and, to the extent possible, only provide it to people you know and trust.  If you post a message on an Internet news group or bulletin board with your e-mail address, pretty much anyone has access to your address and can share that address with others, including marketers.  Spammers also get e-mail addresses from jokes, stories and chain letters that make the rounds on the Internet, so try to avoid sending or forwarding messages with a large list of addressees.  If you register with a website by providing your e-mail address, make sure you check their privacy policy to see if they share your address with anyone.  If the site does not have a privacy policy or if that policy is unclear, keep your e-mail address to yourself.  And be careful when signing up for any kind of mailing list that asks for your e-mail address--this is just another way that marketers can get your address.
   
• The best way to avoid spam is to ignore it--if you respond to these messages, the marketers who send them will know that yours is a "live" Email account.  Be wary of responding to any message that asks you to respond in order to avoid future messages--many senders simply use this ploy to see if your e-mail account is active.  If you wish to filter out messages, your Internet Service Provider probably offers filtering functions that allow you to automatically delete certain messages.  Click on the "Help" section of your Email program for this information, and call your ISP with any questions or complaints about unwanted messages.
   
• Never send your credit card number, bank account number, or any other important piece of information in response to an unsolicited E-mail, no matter how legitimate the message appears to be.
   
• Always be suspicious about Email from people or businesses you are not familiar with, and never open attachments to e-mails from strangers.  These attachments could have a virus that could cause serious damage to your computer or your files, or cause potentially harmful messages to be sent to everyone in your e-mail address book.

If you receive spam messages that are offensive to you, contact your Internet Service Provider.  Your ISP may have policies about e-mail messages with offensive material, and may be able to shield you from receiving offers from a particular source.  They want your business, so make sure you let them know if you feel they are not doing enough to protect you from messages that you do not want to receive.