Why oh Why

Despite the Monty Python spam sketch making fun of spam it is incredibly annoying both when sending legitimate emails and receiving spam.

Spam - What is It?

Spam is also known as Unsolicited Commercial Email or UCE for short. It's usually some sort of electronic communication that you haven't agreed to receive hence the unsolicited. The sender of the spam (the spammer) usually wants money from you either by directly trying to sell you a product or service or indirectly by asking you to visit a website or call a phone number. Spam is the Internet equivalent of the cold caller.

Spammers often employ a whole range of tricks and tools to ensure that they can keep sending these messages. They often employ covert tracking techniques to establish valid email addresses so even if you don't reply to an email to 'unsubscribe' they'll already know you're there and reading!

If you've spent any reasonable length of time on the Internet and you keep an email account, it's almost a certainty you will have received junk mail at some point. Even if you've taken great precautions spammers will eventually get through to you.

Beat the Spammers!

(and no I dont mean with a big stick!) As spammers constantly change the ways they use to get the pointless emails to us the methods of detecting spam are always changing and this means that often legitimate emails get marked as spam! There are no set rules that will always allow messages through (otherwise the spammers would use them!), but there are some guidelines you can follow to reduce your risk of getting your legitimate message to you recipient:

• ensure your message has content, the longer the better (but not just garbage!)
• limit use of images
• ensure any links are valid and good sources and kept to a minimum
• any attachments are as small as possible
• choose the words used carefully! (Mortgage, special offer, discount)
• try not to use to many different fonts and sizes
• Only send attachments that are really needed
• try to limit the number of pictures sent
• Don't send mass emails from your local computers

and all this just to send a legitimate email!

The above is no guarantee that your message will get through but it will increase your chances.