Many individuals receive spam emails without thinking too much about them.But we should take spam seriously and help everyone make online a safer place to be.We’ll examine ways to outwit spam senders and report themto reduce their activity.

Receiving junk emails which are either silly, or making some fantastic claims about products may not seem like a big deal.After all, we have busy lives and junk email isn’t that big a worry?This is true in a way, but you need to understand some facts about spam before you can appreciate the spam email problems.

To begin with, spam emails cost everyone money. People who receive spam email in their  new email addresses at work lose time due to dealing with rubbish emails.This costs the business they work for money.

In addition many people are distressed by spam.A lot of money has been lost to spammers pretending to be banks and building societies.Popular spam stories include illness, or the need to transfer inherited money into a UK bank account.We’re more careful now, but at the time people didn’t know about spam so many people were caught out.

Spam may therefore not be either innocent nor harmless.It can swamp people’s inboxes and upset some, so it needs to be stopped.But it’s hard to keep your address out of spammers’ hands, although new software to filter oiut spam emails is coming out all the time.

One thing you can do to stop spam by yourself, is to use a another  email address when you are on a social networking site, such as MySpace. Avoid using @ but say instead “at” or “AT” – so you will be jane.smithAT (your service provider) rather than.smith@ and the service provider.

Some addresses are obtained using sheer guesswork – so the use of a number or underscore can reduce the chances of a correct guess.Therefore the chances of the software guessing jane_smith79_2@ service provider correctly are fr less.

You can rpeort spam yourself to the Information Commissioner’s Office or to a company like yahoo or google, who take this seriously but it’s a difficult task.