How to aviod getting "Spammed"

Spamming

Spam is defined as "unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses" on the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. (http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/spam) most people will also add that "there is usually no pre-existing relationship between sender and recipient"(Direct Marketing Association of Singapore).

There are laws in Singapore that deal with email fraud, hacking into other people's computers and restricting the use of a computer through spam. Spamming, itself however, is not yet illegal in Singapore (as of 31st December 2005). The laws governing spam are in the making and we do hope that they will be out soon. It will take a while as they have to agree on what is "large number" and also what is mean by "uncolicited". If we have laws to restrict people on sending unsolicited emails, What about flyers? Phone calls?

Why do people spam?

Companies resort to spamming as it is one of the cheapest from of marketing as compared to advertising on any web portal, magazines, or newspaper. In a way, our society is partly to blame as marketing costs are way beyond the reach of new businesses. Still spamming is unethical and reputable business usually do not go to such measures.

In the meantime, most of us are receiving dozens of unwanted emails everyday, most of which are filtered into our deleted messages folder, which we still screen through periodically before deleting them.

So what differentiates a proper marketing email from spam?

In our opinion, and also according to the guidelines given by the (Direct Marketing Association of Singapore), a proper marketing email will contain a genuine contact and will allow the recipient to opt out of future mailings from the sender or company.

How do they get my email address in the first place?

There are many ways a spammer (someone or a company who spams) can get an email:

• buy it from people who own lists (e.g. free magazines, lucky draws or some free email accounts you may have signed up with)
• "harvest" it form the internet (using softwares to "crawl" the internet and filter out email addresses published on the web)
• trial and error - using softwares that are designed to test the authenticity of emails, spammers can actually systematically test out every possible email from a range they specify to see if the email is valid

How can I ensure that I am removed from their mailing list?

From our experiences, most of the spams that we receive today originate from outside Singapore. They are mostly selling some aphrosidiac drugs. Most of them, we believe are individuals peddling these drugs or some other stuff through email. We suspect that they do not have any genuine remove procedures. If you send a remove emial to them, you are telling them that your email account is valid. They may just ignore it or what's worse is that they may sign your address up for more spam!

Our advice is to use a spam filter to filter those keywords to the deleted messages folder and periodically screen through (to ensure there are no important mails wrongly filtered there) before deleting them.

So how do I avoid getting spam?

You can avoid getting spam on your email account by:

• not releasing your email, especially for any freebies or lucky draws, to suspicious web sites
• not publishing it directly on any webiste (if you want to, save it as a picture file so that softwares cannot crawl it)
• not visiting websites of hackers for cheat codes for games, or adult or suspicious web sites
• NOT unsubscribing from spams from suspicious senders (you do not know what they will do with your email)
• following the remove instructions (if you think the email is a genuinie marketing email) to get yourself removed from the list
• if theproblem is extreme, consider starting a new email and let the old one idle for a while (so that after a prolonged period of receiving returned emails, the spammers will remove it from their mailing list).