Many individuals receive spam emails without thinking too much about them.But by working otgether we can reduce spam and make things safer for everyone.This article is about how to reduce spam by reporting spammers or outwitting them.

It may not seem a big issue to get junk emails that are about ludicrous products or silly matters.And after all, there are worse things in life than junk mail?  Well, in some ways this may be true, but for people to understand the problem with spam emails, they have to understand some facts behind spam.

Firstly, spam email costs everyone money. People who receive unsolicited email in their  new email account at work lose time due to dealing with junk emails.This has a cost implication for the business they work for.

In addition many people are distressed by spam.A lot of people have lost money to spammers who pretent to be banks and building societies.Some people have fallen for stories of ill spammers, or beneficiaries of money who need to use a UK bank account.It’s easy with hindsight to say they were easy prey, but at the time these spam scams were less well known.

So spam is not some innocent and harmless inconvenience.It can swamp people’s inboxes and upset some, so it needs to be stopped.It’s hard to prevent spammers getting your address, but at least there is a lot of software to cope with filtering out spam emails.

One thing you can do to stop spam by yourself, is to use a separate  email account when you are on a social networking site, such as Bebo. Avoid using @ but say instead “at” or “AT” – so you will be jane.smithAT (service provider) rather than jane.smith@ then your service provide.

Some addresses are obtained using sheer guesswork – so the use of a number or underscore can reduce the chances of a correct guess.So the software is less likely to guess jane_smith79_2@ service provider correctly.

Spam can be reported to Information Commissioner’s Office, google or yahoo – they work hard to reduce internet spam but it’s a difficult challenge.

Tags: email addresses, spam email