What is Spam?
Spam is unsolicited junk email - generally advertising for some product sent wide-scale to a mailing list or newsgroup. There are a number of ways you can find yourself on a spammer's email list, including signing up for newsletters that sell lists of their clients' email addresses, listing your email address on a webpage or newsgroup, or even by choosing an email address that spammers may be able to guess.

As the solutions to spam improve each day so also do the spammers methods for gathering our personal information. There are several primary ways for a junk mail merchant to get your e-mail address:

1. Spammers can buy 90 million+ e-mail addressess on a single CD for about $20. They simply "load" these e-mail addresses into their bulk mail program and hit Send. Fortunately most of these e-mail addresses are duds and are of no use to the spammer at all.

2. They set up a website designed to "grab" your e-mail address if you happen to surf to their webpage. All that's required for this to work perfectly for the junk mail merchant is a very small amount of javascrpt. You'll receive no warning when this happens.

3. E-mail extractors can also be used. These programs wander around the web looking for e-mail addresses on websites or in online forums. Once they find an address they harvest it and send report back to the main programs with details. A typical e-mail extractor can gather 15,000 e-mail addresses per hour.

4. They prowl online forums manually gathering e-mail addresses. This is a slow process but more and more webmasters are making it difficult for spammers to automatically harvest e-mail addresses from their groups. Paid membership forums are the main target. Customers who can afford $20 a month to use an online forum are a prime target for their next spam campaign. Money follows money as it were.

5. They use newsgroup harvesters to automatically scan for and gather e-mail addresses. A junk mailer can gather e-mail addresses from 20,000 - 30,000 newsgroups simultaneously. They can potentially gather hundreds of thousands of e-mail addresses in very little time using this method.

6. They set up a hoax competition website or similar. The only condition for entering the draw/lotto is entering your e-mail address. Once you enter your e-mail address you are on yet another spam list.

7. A "dictionary" program is used. It takes common domains like @yahoo.com and then generates random e-mail addresses using peoples first and last names combined with other guesswork to create a working junk mail list. This is time consuming but works perfectly well.Once a spammer has your e-mail address he or she will then gather all the required data for their next mail shot with you as one of the target customers. There are solutions and the primary solution in use today is Junk E-mail filters , which are also called spamkillers.

Steps to control Spam

Don't Respond to Spam
Spammers say they will take your name off the list, but most are lying. What they do is confirm that your email address is valid . If you respond, they sell your address to other Spammers, meaning you will receive more Spam.

Spam Filtering
Anti-Spam software can help reduce Spam. Following our Spam filtering instructions can adjust the level of Spams received. Click here for more info.

Don't post your address on your personal website
Spammers who sell email addresses as a business use special software that retrieves email addresses from the web pages. The software goes through the Internet seeking e-mail text for their database to be used to send Spam.

Have a second email address to use for newsgroups and for Website sign-ups
Have a public disposable email address such as something@hotmail.com or something@yahoo.com and a private email address. If a website is asking for your email address, in most cases they want to use it for something; this is when to use the disposable email address. Newsgroups are popular for Spammers to retrieve email addresses so here again use the disposable one.

Don't buy from Spammers
Spammers make money by Spamming. If people stop buying things advertised in Spam, companies will quit using Spammers to advertise.

How to report Spam to Momentum Online

Spam can be reported by forwarding the message with full headers to abuse@moment.net.

Click here for instructions on forwarding an email with full headers.