Spam - undesired ads to your mail box

I'm sure that everyone e-mail user has received pornography, fast loan, university degree promotion or other undesired mail message offering related products or services. It is called spam, junk mail or just unwanted mail. However, spam is not related to spyware or privacy problems.

How does spam sender know my e-mail address?

Probably you provided your e-mail address during forum registration, subscribing to newsletter, posting to newsgroups or possibly spammer just guessed it. If you are using these services mentioned, the best way to avoid spam - creating e-mail box for unwanted mail, that will be used for online registrations and everywhere you have to provide e-mail address.

If you received spam...

... delete it immediately. But before you get angry about receiving unwished mail try to remember all newsletters you subscribed to. If you do not wish to receive newsletters anymore - unsubscribe using on the bottom of the message located link.

Spam filters

If you became a junk mail victim, almost every e-mail service provider is offering automatic spam remover called spam filter.
Spam messages can be eliminated in server (before you download mail) or in your computer (after mail has been downloaded). Mail elimination in server has an advantage because you do not have to waste your time while deleting messages manually.
Spam filter are analyzing senders address, header and message content. If a filter detects that one of those gauges are related to junk mail content - message is going to be removed.

Do not reply to spam

There is no need in replying to spam, because the address may be unreachable, corrupted or message can simply be ignored.

Black list

These days most e-mail boxes contain setting that allows user to create a list of addresses that will be ignored trying to reach recipient. So if you are periodically receiving spam messages from the same sender, you can easily solve this problem by creating undesired senders list called black list.