How to get solid email spam protection

Spam was once a minor annoyance. Then it became a major problem, both for corporations and individuals. Now most people accept it as a fact of life. But you don't have to.

Nearly all web-based email providers have built in email spam protection in their software. They highlight keywords like "Viagra" or even "V1agra", to keep them out of the inboxes of their millions of clients.

They're also able to put visual identification protections into their software to protect their users from mass-emails of dubious origins. The visual email spam protection works because, more often than not, it is not a person sending out the spam but rather a program written or used by people that automatically sends spam. This is called a "bot", computer parlance for "robot." Computers can't see the way humans can, so the visual clues used to be impossible for them to decipher, which slowed the torrent of spam for a while.

But as always, innovation wins out and the spammers came up with software that was able to read these visual safeguards, reopening the floodgates. Visual email spam protection had to get more sophistocated and did, but it turned out not to be the cure-all end to spam that Bill Gates himself once thought it would be. Gates, of course, famous said that spam would no longer be an issue by 2006.

How wrong he was. Spammers send hundreds of billions of emails a day, and only need a fraction of 1% of those emails to work to turn a huge profit. That's why you need the best, up-to-date email spam protection.

Start by switching from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox, a more customizable and secure browser. Download "Noscript" and "Adblock plus", both of which can prevent unwanted content from unwanted emails from opening and infecting your computer.

Once you have that up and running, just use your common sense. One of the first rules of the internet is that anythign that has the word "free" in the title isn't actually free, so make emails of that nature as spam. Also, if you get an email from a reputable source like the Social Security Administration, don't click on any links provided in that email. Instead, open a new browser window and navigate to the needed page yourself. Spammers have been known to produce perfect forgeries of emails from reputable sources, so make sure to do your due dilligence.

And make sure you realize that the best email spam protection comes from you! Use your common sense, use the tools your email host and ISP provide, and always look before you leap. It's the best way to avoid falling prey to spammers.