| We've all had this experience: You login to your email | | | | people on the list, something that they got off a |
| account, excited to read messages from friends, | | | | website. The joke could be about George Bush. On |
| relatives, co-workers, or your girlfriend perhaps. You | | | | the other hand, it could be a joke about someone |
| view the link to your inbox, and it says you have five | | | | who was born with a brain. When you decide to |
| messages. Fervently, you open your inbox, your | | | | forward these witticisms to all of your friends and list |
| heart is racing, you sit up in your chair a bit, leaning | | | | all of their email addresses in the "To" or "Cc" fields, |
| forward closer to the computer as you get ready to | | | | you could be actually sending all of your friends' email |
| enter a new dimension. | | | | addresses to the spammer who sent you the joke. |
| What do you find when the page finishes loading? | | | | Clever spammers use programs that grab email |
| Well, you see a spectacular cornucopia of diverse, | | | | addresses when you forward or reply to such a |
| informative topics referenced in the "subject" for | | | | message. |
| each email: | | | | Sometimes these email larcenists send you an email |
| "Erectile Dysfunction? Look no further - Viagra, 90% | | | | message with an exciting subject that causes you to |
| off!" | | | | open it, and then there's not much there, but by |
| "Get a 200 year mortgage!" | | | | opening the email you've unleashed a Trojan horse |
| "Reverse the aging process, regress back to infancy!" | | | | that crawls out of the email and onto your hard drive |
| "Make 10 million dollars per hour stuffing envelopes!" | | | | and grabs email addresses that are stored in folders |
| These emails can try a man's patience. It would be | | | | on your computer where you save your "Buddy List" |
| one thing if you had signed up for a service that | | | | if you use AOL, or strips the email addresses off of |
| emails to you, every 5 minutes, titillating offers that, | | | | any and every email you have saved on your |
| if they were true, could make you the richest man in | | | | machine. The virus then proceeds to send all of these |
| the world with a mortgage that your ancestors, 200 | | | | stolen email addresses back to the perpetrator, who |
| years from now, will pay off in full, unless the house | | | | may have just grabbed 100 email addresses off of |
| has completely rotted to the ground by then. | | | | you, maybe more. |
| However, most of these emails come unsolicited. | | | | Finally, what happens a great deal of the time is |
| How the heck did they get your email address in the | | | | people who are successful at building email lists, |
| first place? Well, I'm not really sure. | | | | sometimes with a legitimate business where they |
| Just kidding! There are a variety of tactics that | | | | have a huge database of 10 million or more email |
| spammers use to get your email address. Sometimes, | | | | addresses, turn around and sell that same list over, |
| you sign up for a service or buy a product from a | | | | and over, and over again to the spammers. This |
| website, and when you provide your email address | | | | happens all of the time, and there's really no way to |
| during the order process, the individual who runs the | | | | stop it. Your email address has probably been sold a |
| website and is collecting the information then turns | | | | thousand times since you started using email, you |
| around and adds all of those email addresses to his | | | | just don't realize it. |
| electronic address book and sends you offers from | | | | So, how do you prevent spam? Well, you can use |
| an email address associated with a totally different | | | | message filters that filter out emails that contain |
| domain name so you don't know it's him. | | | | certain keywords (most email accounts come with a |
| Sometimes, these clever marketers skulk around | | | | filter), you can block certain email addresses, or you |
| message boards and other internet forums and just | | | | can set up a very sophisticated set of "message |
| copy all of the email addresses for each of the | | | | rules" if you have email client software that has this |
| people who have posted messages to the board, | | | | option, and with this feature you can really set some |
| and they can usually collect thousands of email | | | | very specific boundaries for your email account. |
| addresses this way. | | | | So, be aware of all these techniques that spammers |
| One way they can then build upon their treasure | | | | employ, establish some ground rules for your email |
| trove of stolen emails and grow their list | | | | account, and you can probably avoid most spam in |
| exponentially is by then sending a joke to the various | | | | the future. |