Don't You Just Love Spam?

I have certain customers that love to sign up for "free offers" on the internet with their primary email address. About a week after they sign up for the "once in a lifetime deal", I get a call and listen to the woes of a person afflicted with self imposed "spamalotis." Yes I just made that up. Spamalotis is not really a word, but I bet The Big Bald Blog will index really well for it in a few days. But I digress.

Most of the time, I explain to them that all it takes is for their email address to get on one list, and it's all downhill from there. It seems like common sense but here are some things that you can do to avoid getting spam.

Don't take any "free IQ tests." This one seems to be the inbox killer that most people fall for. If you HAVE TO provide your email address to complete an online transaction or you want to sign up for something, USE AN ALTERNATE EMAIL. Go get yourself a Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail and use that email every time you are required to provide an email address. Save your primary email address for professional correspondence.

ITnews reports that a new spam site is found every 3 seconds. "New figures suggest that 92.3 percent of all email sent globally during the first three months of 2008 was spam." Yes you read that right. 92.3% of all the email sent was spam. Wow, what a staggering amount. "The data from the study also indicated that 23,300 new spam-related web pages were created every day during the period, or one about every three seconds."

I have a discussion board on another site and I always thought it was strange that I got a ton of spammy sign-ups from .ru domains. The ITnews report also said that, "...the number of spam messages sent from compromised Russian computers has more than doubled over the past year.

In the first quarter of 2007, Russia was in tenth position in the chart, relaying just three per cent of the world’s spam. Today this figure stands at 7.4 percent."

There are all kinds of free spam killer options out there as well as ones you pay for, but the more you protect your primary email address the better off you will be.