spam

What is spam?
Unsolicited commercial e-mail better known as Spam or junk e-mail are e-mails we all receive trying to sell us something. It is usually either a service or product. Junk e-mail can also contain viruses and now phishing attempts.

Junk e-mail usually arrives in your inbox with subject matters like "Paul is not a jerk", "designer bags", "we met online", "your money has been refunded" and a million others. Many of the e-mails contain files or pictures that aid the offenders in confirming the address is valid.

These subjects are meant to entice you into opening the e-mail. Once you have opened the e-mail the files or pictures download confirming to the offenders that your e-mail address is valid. Once this has been accomplished a large stream of junk e-mail is sent to your address.

Some of these e-mails have unsubscribe links in them that say something like. " if you no longer wish to receive mail from us click here". Once you click on the link it does not unsubscribe you it confirms to the offenders that your e-mail address is real and active and they again send huge amounts of junk e-mail to your address.

There are many ways that e-mail addresses are obtained. One of the many ways that spammers get e-mail addresses is by sending bots to find e-mail addresses from Web sites, newsgroups and other sources. Once they have the addresses they then send junk e-mail that can contain  pornography and viruses.

The bottom line is NEVER open e-mail from someone you do not know, delete it immediately. Remember online be as safe as you can be, in real life opening mail won't hurt us. However, in the cyber world you can lose your computer to a virus and even worse you could lose your identity and be robbed of almost everything before you know it.