What it is:

Think of junk e-mail as just as you would junk mail in your home mailbox. Whenever you register for a vehicle, apply for a credit card or buy a new home, it seems that your mailbox and phone lines get infiltrated with related junk mail and phone calls from telemarketers.

Here are some ways that spam can find you:

• Registering on certain Websites for a membership subscription, newsletter, prize, or application. Your e-mail address may then be sold to a third party marketing company who will add you to their e-mail mailing list.
• Publishing articles in online newsgroups or forums
• Listing your e-mail address on Websites such as your company or family’s contact info page.
• Having a catch-all account

Some options for protection:

• Create an alternate spam email account and then use that account name when signing up for things that require an email address.
• Install spam filtering software which will allow you to block out e-mails that contain specific words, phrases or subjects. Example “Check out what I did this weekend”
• Use Microsoft Outlook Junk Mail box feature, which allows you to flag, and automatically filter unwanted junk e-mails into a separate folder, which gets deleted.
• Change your e-mail address and only notify people in your address book of your new address. Example mymail@mail.com to myothermail@mail.com. All of the junk e-mails that were going to the old e-mail address won’t follow you to the new e-mail address.

Summary of Bush’s new spam bill:

• Bush’s new bill will outlaw shady techniques used by some of the Internet's most prolific e-mailers, but the government still hasn't decided if it will create a do-not-spam registry (blacklist) of e-mail users that send spam.
• The law will prohibit senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail from disguising their identities by using false return addresses or misleading subject lines, and it will prohibit senders from harvesting e-mail addresses off Web sites.
• They also say the federal law does not keep e-mail users in America from receiving spam from other nations. In other words, as a loop hole, spam organizations can setup a server in another country to blast out its junk e-mail and be within the law.

Spam Statistics

• It is estimated that by 2007, 70% of all e-mail messages will be spam