Residential Internet Support

Are you tired of seeing your mailbox fill up with junk email (otherwise known as spam or UCE - Unsolicited Commercial Email)?  Have you ever wondered how the spammers got your email address in the first place? Do you wish it would stop?

If you're in this situation there is good news and bad news.  The bad news is that your email address has probably been sold to thousands of junk emailers already and you probably can't get off of the list or stop them from emailing you. The good news is that if you're willing to change your email address you can most likely prevent this from happening again.

How Does SPAM Start?

Let's take a look at how this annoyance started. The people who create lists of email addresses and then sell them to spammers find these addresses on the Internet. They have computer programs that search the Internet collecting every email address they can find. They search newsgroups, web pages, and discussion boards. Any public place on the Internet is fair game and these programs will collect every email address they come across.

If you've been receiving spam your email address was probably posted or displayed in a public place on the Internet. It may have been on a message board or perhaps a newsgroup. Maybe your email address was displayed on your very own web page. Wherever it was, it was captured and added to a list of millions and then sold.

At this point, it's too late to get off of the list. The people who collect these email addresses usually store them on CD-ROMs and sell them to people who want to send out junk mail.  If your email address is on one of these CDs, it's permanently recorded.  As long as you keep your current email address, you will probably continue to get spam. However, if you're willing to get rid of your current email address you can start over and avoid this problem in the future.  Even if you haven't started receiving spam, some of the tips we offer below will help you avoid it in the future.

PLEASE NOTE: We can't recommend changing your email address unless you're really getting a lot of spam and it's annoying you a lot!  Changing your email address is like changing your phone number....you will have to let *all* your friends and relatives know about the change or they won't be able to contact you.

How to Keep Off SPAM Lists

Whether you need to get a new email address or not, these are some of the things you should consider when trying to hide from the people who compile mailing lists:

1. Don't ever post your private email address in a public place. Use it for emailing your friends and acquaintances, but don't ever post on a message board, newsgroup or any other publicly accessible place on the Internet. If you do, your email address might be captured by one of those unscrupulous people and could be added to a mailing list. Obviously, this could make life difficult, as you would probably like to take part in discussions and leave messages in newsgroups and other places. So how do you follow step #1 and still post publicly?  The answer is step #2.
2. Get yourself a "throw away" email address from one of the many places that offer free email accounts. This would include Yahoo!, Hotmail, AltaVista, DejaNews, etc... Use this email address only when you post messages in public forums.

   You can check this free email account periodically to see if you receive email. If this "throw away" account gets added to a mailing list and you start getting junk mail, you can just ignore it (because you probably won't be checking this mailbox all that often), or get rid of it and sign up for another free account. You will still have your private email address known only to your friends and you will never have to change it.

   A quick note to Usenet users: If you post to Usenet news groups, make sure you change your return email address in your news program to your "throw away" email address, otherwise your email address will be collected.

More Information:

To learn more about fighting Spam, visit CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email: http://www.cauce.org/ or for more information on how to Respond to SPAM, check out: http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05032