There's nothing like checking your email only to find that your inbox is flooded with unsolicited messages from people who do not know. No, you're not interested in buying dog food, beauty products, diet pills, plants, or software! But still, you get these annoying messages.

Spam, this little Four Letter Word has angered millions of people around the world.

What is spam anyway? Spam is also called unsolicited commercial email (UCE), Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) or junk mail, spam is sent to several people at large to advertising.

Spam has negative effects, apart from annoying people. Apparently, it's a waste of time to sort through tons of email, while trying to figure out that email is valid and which is spam. Many times you missed important messages because they only thought they were spam. Spam also the potential for spread of virus, pornography and fraud.

It's not just people who are affected by spam. Large companies and other businesses are suffering too.

Many companies have already filed lawsuits against spammers who send spam and say they are companies, when in fact they are not and were sent only to cause trouble and ruin the reputation of companies.

The NCSA and Bank of America released a study called "Online Fraud Report," and showed that 87 percent of respondents were confident that they could distinguish real emails from fraudulent emails. It turned out that 60 percent could not identify legitimate emails. This only shows that the spam problem has become worse. Most people can not even recognize legitimate emails from spam.

The receipt of spam is really a nuisance to people and businesses.

You may be wondering how these spammers found your email address. With the technology available today, should not be surprised to find that spammers use a number of techniques that can get the email addresses of other people. They could obtain lists of email addresses of DNS, Usenet, or web pages can also guess the popular domain names in common, or use programs called web spiders to find email addresses on the web.

So how to get rid of spam? Unfortunately, there is no 100 percent solution to this problem. You can test the anti-spam software or spam filters, but this will only reduce the number of spam you receive, but not eliminate it entirely.

Another thing you can do is to click the unsubscribe link, usually located at the bottom of spam email.

As I said before, some spammers acquire email addresses through guessing popular domain names in common so it would be desirable to establish an email account that is difficult to guess. Use a different email when registering with forums, mailing lists, chat rooms, user groups, and register on websites.

Apart from email spam, a new range of spam has recently emerged. Spammers have found new ways of how they could get those spam messages to people. The new target of spammers are user groups, discussion groups, instant messaging, online gaming communities, blogs, and even guest books.

With spam on the rise progressively, it is very important that you understand their nature and protect yourself by learning more about how you can get rid of it. Spam can waste their time, energy and money it would really be helpful if you know how to block annoying messages.

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