Spam or junk email, refers to all the publicity that is sent through email in a massive, undiscriminated and unsolicited way. Nowadays, the term is applied  to the publicity that people receive in their cell phones as text messages too.

In fact, about an 80% of the email that reaches your email account is spam, in most cases people do not realize it since there are filters that send them directly to a spam folder.

Spam is the term that is applied to the publicity emails you receive without having asked for it, and it constitutes the cheapest, fastest and easiest way of sending publicity to thousands of people.

There are some easy ways to avoid spam, or at least to minimize it tremendously. Apply these simple tips and fight it!

- Keep at least two email accounts and use your private one only for personal purposes and use your public email account to register in forums, chat rooms, e-lists, or newsletters.

- Never publish your personal email address in any site of public access.

- Do not respond to any unsolicited email. Most spammers use the responses to verify which email accounts are valid. The more you respond, the more spam you will receive.

- Verify that your email application has a spam blocking feature. Most of the times it is done automatically, in others you will have to do it manually.

- Every time you  receive an undesired email, mark it as undesired or spam. This way you will be assuring that any email from that sender will go directly to the spam folder of your email

- When forwarding an email to several persons, like presentations, pictures, jokes, etc., take care of sending it to a main receiver and then the others as hidden copy. Also, if you notice that the body of the email contains the email addresses of previous receivers, make sure to delete them.

This is to prevent spammers from obtaining emails to enlarge their database.

- Mask your email address if you need to publish it in any website to  prevent robots to capture it. Spammers normally use robots that capture emails from the web, so  if  instead of writing your full email  (name@provider.com) you mask it (name at provider.com). The readers will understand you and you will be protecting your email.

Unfortunately, no matter how much we want to avoid it, spam will still be trying to hit on us as long as it keeps being a profitable business for some companies, all we can do is apply these tips to prevent it from disturbing us.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.