How to fight spam

The best way to fight against spam is to avoid being its target. The following is a list of things that will cause you to become a target of spammers

• Sending messages to news groups.

• Giving your email address in an online shop.

• Subscribing to an Internet service which requests an email.

• Sending an email requesting to unsubscribe from a spam distribution list because
  unfortunately, this is almost exclusively used to confirm the validity of the new email.

• Subscribe to, or participate in a mail distribution list.

• Online conversation using instant messaging programs. (a primary cause of virus infections).

• Including email addresses in web page HTML code which are automatically extracted by
  robots searching for code containing the @ sign. If your email address is on the internet, you have already shared it with every spammer on the Web.

Spammers buy mailing lists from people who steal them. Often, the thieves are employees of companies who do a significant amount of business on the Web. Occasionally, the thieves are IT  "professionals" who have access to email databases belonging to their clients.  Spammers also randomly generate email aliases using common words and names such as "support", "sales" or "David", respectively. These are combined with domains registered in the NIC, providing spammers with valid email addresses, simply by "rolling the dice".
Discerning which of the thousands of generated addresses are valid is a spammers next task. The most advanced spammers include in their spam,  images that reside on their server. When a recipient downloads and examines the HTML content of their mail, their mail client (such as Outlook)  requests the image from the server, which generates an automatic process of email address validation in the spammers database. Don't open spam. When you open it you tell the spammer that your email address is valid. Valid email addresses are a commodity in the spamming world.

Everyone can start fighting against the spam that invades work centers and personal email accounts by strictly applying the following rules:

• Do not purchase any products advertised by this kind of mail. This will discourage spammers from sending more spam, since their aim is to make money. According to ComputerWorld, one out of every 400 spam recipients ends up purchasing the product or service advertised.

• Never reply under any circumstances to an unwanted email.

• Never forward chain mails. No matter how cute or moving or funny the chain mail is, it will end up in the hands of spammers who will use the list of addresses in these chains.

• Do not launch an electronic attack on the spammer’s email account because the address that appears in this type of mail has probably been stolen or does not even exist.

• Always us BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) when sending to multiple email addresses.