How can I keep from getting unsolicited commercial e-mail, or “spam?”
A. Most senders of spam get e-mail addresses from a variety of sources. For example, if you’ve ever posted to the Usenet newsgroups, your e-mail address is available for public viewing. Sophisticated spammers can harvest e-mail addresses from these discussion forums using automated software. One obvious way to avoid spam is not to post comments online. Unfortunately, that’s like staying in your house 24 hours a day with the shades drawn. You could alter the settings in your Usenet reader to show a false e-mail address when you post something, such as adding a NOSPAM at the end of your real address. But then someone wanting to send you useful e-mail must go to the trouble of removing the add-on to make the address work. The latest versions of Netscape Navigator, Eudora Pro and Microsoft’s Outlook Express — the most popular e-mail readers — all have the ability to filter e-mail into specific folders based on keywords that appear in the mail. For example, messages sent from some spammer
