Everyone with an email address seems to get spam.

These unwanted email adverts for things you would never buy in a thousand years can range from the mildly irritating to the deeply offensive, but they seem to be just part of being online.

And often new internet users find that their email accounts start receiving adverts after only a few days.

They found that the commonest way an email address gets added to a spammer’s list of targets is for it to be copied from a web page.

If you put your own web site up and have your email address in it, expect to start getting spam within days.

And if you post a message to a chat room or discussion page and it shows your email address, then you’ll also be a target.

What can you do?

One solution is to write your email address so that a computer can’t read it.

But even keeping your email address secret won’t always help.

So I might put ‘bill at andfinally dot com’ on my webpage: a person can read it, a spammer’s address collecting program can’t.

Some of the worst spam companies use a program that generates all the possible email addresses for one particular internet.

For example - everything from aaaaa@aol.com to zzzz@aol.com, and then just sends spam to each one of them.

This means we can’t just rely on not publishing our email addresses to keep us safe from this irritating rubbish in our inboxes.

We need programs to block these unwanted messages and laws that force commercial emailers to respect our requests to stop receiving their ads.

Otherwise we’ll just end up drowning in spam – and that doesn’t sound very pleasant at all.

Once you’re on a spammer’s list of email addresses, your details will be traded and sold to lots of other companies.

Even if you never respond to an email, few of these companies bother to remove email addresses, so you will continue to get unwanted messages for a long, long time.

Mailwasher Update

I have found this myself. For the past six weeks I have been using a program called ‘Mailwasher’ to check my email.

It lets me delete spam before it reaches my computer, and also lets me send a message back to the spammer saying that my address is no longer working.

But I have not noticed any drop in the volume of unwanted messages I am receiving. It is still well over one hundred a day.

That’s right – one hundred a day.

It seems that few, if any, of the spammers that have my address in their database can be bothered to keep their lists up to date or take notice of these ‘bounced’ emails.

I suppose they are too busy thinking up ridiculous schemes to part gullible people from their money.

It’s a shame they can’t use their creative skills for something less annoying.

Spam, Spam and more Spam
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The US music industry has been remarkably successful in persuading the courts that anything which lets people swap information over the is illegal.

And that it is purely there to let people break copyright law and exchange music files.

They managed to get Napster, the first such service, shut down, forcing it into bankruptcy.

And they have persuaded many universities and companies that swapping files is a dangerous and probably criminal activity that should be blocked. But now a US judge has shown some sense.

He has refused to order two of the biggest file sharing services, Grokster and Streamcast, to be shut down because they can be used to break copyright law.

According to Los Angeles Judge Stephen Wilson, these services are as likely to be used for legal purposes as they are to be used to swap pirated music copies.

And as long as this is the case they are entitled to carry on running. This seems perfectly sensible to me.

After all, video recorders can be used to break copyright but that isn’t a reason to ban them, is it?

Should we have better copyright laws for the Internet?
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