Spam: the unsolicited e-mail you receive more often than not. It’s usually commercial advertising and frequently for questionable products, get-rich-quick schemes, or illegal services.

The Two Sides to Preventing Spam

Stop them getting your email address: If you can stop them in the first place, you'll be much better off.

What to do if they have got your email address: It's not a perfect world, your email address is going to get out. Besides getting a brand new email address, not much can be done to stop the flow of spam from reaching you. The Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources takes multiple precautions at stopping or reducing the amount of spam your receive. For more information about reducing spam, contact Mark Cherry at: 542.3953

Harvested Address Spam

This is probably the most common type of spam. The spammers use a computer system (spider or spam-bot') to check almost every website on the internet (including yours). The 'spam bot' looks at the code of every web page, it looks for the '@' symbol. When it finds an '@' it knows its found an email address. It then collects the bit either side of the '@' symbol to capture your email address and add it to the spammers database of millions of harvested addresses. From then on that address will receive lots of spam!

Keep it Hidden Don't post your email address on web pages, message boards, Usenet, mailing list archives or other online sources that will display your email address.

How to find out if your email address is published on a website: Go to Google.com and type your email address into the search box. Google can usually show if your email address is on any website. If google can find your address you can be sure the spammers have got it. Tip: Sometimes the website-page with your email address may be very long, from Google click the link that says 'Cached' and you will see the page and your email address will be highlighted.

Virus Spam

This is perhaps the 2nd most common type of spam.

• Somone else's computer (not yours) gets infected with a virus.
• The address book (usually outlook, outlook express) on their computer has your email address.
• The virus sends a spam to every address on the address book.

How to prevent it: You can not prevent virus spam from being sent to you. The person with the infected computer needs to use quality anti virus software to clean their computer (see preventing computer viruses). You need a good spam filter to delete this kind of spam as it arrives.