Spamming

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What is Spam?

Spam... What does spam mean to you? Well, let's clarify things. I'm not talking about the gelatinous gloop, the 'Hawaiian steak' that is pre-cooked shoulder of ham in a can, I'm talking about junk email. Junk email or spam is the term given to unsolicited emails, typically of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to mailing lists, individual and corporate email addresses and newsgroups.

Spam Leaves A Very Bad Taste

Although statistics vary on how big a problem spam is, the fact is that spam wastes a huge amount of time and money for email users throughout the world. Here are a few spam-stats for starters:

It's estimated that 40% of all email sent is spam.
Over 55 billion spam emails are sent every day (2006).
The average PC user receives between 6-10 spam emails a day.
During one year, the average PC user can receive over 2,000 spam emails.
Spam costs non-business Internet users approximately US$255 million every year.
16% of email address changes were due to spam.
Between 2006 and 2007, spam was expected to increase by about 63%.
About 28% of people respond to spam emails.
25% of spam is product related.
Over 85% of email addresses posted on websites receive spam.

Sources: www.spam-o-meter.com, www.marshal8e6.com

Avoiding The Whiff of Spam

It's almost impossible to avoid spam, but here a few things you can do to make sure it's an infrequent item on your daily work menu:

Only submit your email address to select websites.
Always check to see if a website has a privacy policy with regard to use of your email address.
Check the wording carefully next to permission tick-boxes.
Use a secondary email address (made up of an imaginary name) for online forms, subscriptions, forums, chat rooms and blogs.
Do not respond to spam emails, just consign them to the flames.
Never publish your email address on your website, use contact forms with captcha security code.
Set up spam or junk filtering on your email account.

Glossary

If these terms sound like a foreign language to you, please don't stew about it. You can refer to the (easy-to-understand) glossary of terms for more information.

Store Them Away

If you want to keep any pages tucked away in your online pantry of goodies, simply bookmark the relevant page in your browser by clicking:

'Favourites' (if you're using Internet Explorer/IE)
'Bookmarks' (if you're using Firefox).

Online Marketing: Spamming | What is Spam? | Statistics About Spam | How to Avoid Spam Emails