Is spam a daily annoyance to you, too? The flood of junk emails you see every day is what I’m talking about, not the tinned meat product of the same name.

I’m sure you’ve heard of this basic computer term.

These messages varies from mortgage rates to making body parts bigger, to porn, and their numbers grow every day. Some experts estimate that junk email accounts for over 90% of all emails!

Spam is named after an old sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus which took place in a diner where everything is full of spam. Conversation is almost impossible because of the sound of a group of vikings chanting loudly about spam. Years later, this reminded someone of how email in your inbox can get lost in all of the junk mail, so they named it spam and the name stuck.

It can be hard to avoid getting your email address on *some* list. It’s not uncommon for many people to get 50 to 100 pieces of spam in just one day – I know some people who get over 300 every day! And the problem is getting much worse. 
Luckilly there are ways for someone to limit how much spam they get. Here are a few tips:

*Don’t bother trying to unsubscribe or ask to be taken off the list. Those emails may have a link or a reply address to stop getting emails, but most either just don’t function, or you’re just telling the spammers that they’ve got a live one.

*Never order anything advertised in junk email, visit the website, or in any way answer the ad. The spammers are about to email a million people at once, for next to nothing. The spammer will send more each time anyone orders.

*Try to avoid entering your email address on websites as much as possible. If you do, consider getting a second email account with Hotmail or a similar service. So you can give an alternative address.
Many websites offering contests, joke lists, free greeting cards, etc. sell your email address along with millions of others to spammers around the world.

*Never sign an online guestbook. As an experiment I recently created a new email address and entered it on about five guestbooks I found with a Google search. Within 24 hours I was getting spam, and it grew to dozens a day within a week.

*Just opening an unsolicited ad while connected to the internet can alert spammers that they have a live address. So if your email client has a “work offline” option (You’ll often locate this in the File menu) click it before opening dubious emails. You can also disconnect from the internet completely, but unless you are still making the mistake of using the out-of-date dialup, this may involve unplugging connectors. The best option is to use the “offline” feature of your email application.
If you use a web-based email service like Gmail, you won’t be able to go offline in this way. Check your mail options for a setting to turn off graphics in emails, or to display mail in plain text only. If you see something about not loading remote images, or blocking remote images, turn it on.
These steps can help keep the spammers from knowing you’ve opened the message.

*Avoid forwarding emails to large numbers of people.
Not everyone realizes that when you forward a message, the email addresses of everyone who receives the message is visible to every person who reads it. If any of the recipients is a spammer, or if one of a friend’s computer is infected by certain viruses, they can harvest all of those addresses, including yours.
If you do send an email to multiple people, you can avoid revealing email addresses by entering addresses in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) area instead of To or CC. This will hide the list of addresses from everyone else.
If you’re sending a message from somebody on to others, you should copy and paste just the message into a new email window rather than hitting the forward button — this trims the message down and protects the privacy of others.

*To deal with the spam you already receive, most email applications allow you to create “filters” or “rules” that move incoming email into a specified folder or even right into the trash.
Setting filters up can be complicated, but the newer versions of many email applications, including Mozilla Thunderbird and Mac OS X Mail make it much easier.
The programs recognize patterns in spam, and use your address book as a white list of legit senders. You can use a click to clear junk. The more spam you mark, the better the program gets at automatically taking care of them. You’ll make a memory of tons of unwanted spam in your inbox.
Many internet providers also provide a spam filter which blocks email before it gets to your computer. The problem with this is that they often block legitimate mail and you may never know about it.
Because of this, I recommend using filtering software on your own computer, such as the two programs I just mentioned.

Ultimately, spam is a fact of modern life, and it’s next to impossible to avoid all of it, mostly because of what other people are doing with your email. If your current email address is about to collapse from the amount of spam you get, you might be forced to get a new one.

After that, if you follow the suggestions and basic computer tips above, you’ll have a good chance of keeping it under control. While a written article can never quite work as well as something visual similar to a computer training cd I hope you found it helpful.