Email spam which is also known as bulk or junk e-mail relates to unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant, or inappropriate emails, especially commercial advertising emails that you receive and is often sent in its thousands or millions from the sender.

If you receive spam email it usually indicates that you have supplied your email address to someone who may have then sold or passed it on to others. You may also just be unlucky and receive a spam email as a result of the sender automatically generating likely email addresses.

Some basic steps you can take to avoid receiving spam emails are:

1. Never give your email address to those people or organisations you do not trust.

2. Never open email spam and definitely never reply to email spam or use any unsubscribe type option in the email, as all this does is confirm that your email address works and therefore you are likely to be sent more spam emails.

3. Set your email program like Microsoft Outlook Express to not display the “Preview Panel” (See Outlook Express Menu item View then Layout…) because just opening a spam email might be enough to send information back to the sender that your email address is valid. For example if the email contains an image, fetching this image when the email is open may be enough to let the sender know you viewed the email and so your email address works.

You could also set up an extra email address that you only use when you register with websites or forums. If this email address then starts receiving spam you could stop using that address and set up another one for that purpose. Your main email address is only then given to friends, family and work etc. In this way you main email address is less likely to get spam emails.

If you start receiving spam emails and wish to keep your current email address, you will need to scan your incoming emails for spam with some spam control software.

Spam control software must be easy to install and must detect and quarantine any spam emails. The spam email detection method used by the software must give low false positive spam email detections i.e. this software should only occasionally detect valid email as spam.

Spam emails detected by such software are usually placed in a spam email folder in your email program such as Outlook. If you want to you can then look at the list of emails in this folder to ensure that they are valid emails (remembering item 3 above) before you then use the spam control software to delete all the spam emails in that folder.

If you follow the above you should have a relatively easy time regarding spam emails.