A good article on spam e-mails. Why they’re sent and how to stop getting them.

Mac Love, Not War: Junk Email and Spam Abatement Strategies

Unwanted junk email or “spam” is a persistent problem for most email users, and usually gets worse. Since email is nearly free to send and there seem to be suckers born every minute to click on mortgage enlargement ads, these scams are too lucrative to disappear entirely.

The one thing I don’t see in this article is to carefully choose your e-mail client. Some work better than others for filtering spam. MS Outlook can be quite bad about not filtering properly and opening new mail (and spam) in the preview-pane when you don’t want it to. Sure you can leave the preview-pane closed, but it’s a nice feature when it works right. I changed to Mozilla ThunderBird a few years ago and it’s very nice. It’s filters work well, so I don’t ever see the vast majority of junk that I get. In the case of the few that get past it’s filters, it by default doesn’t open e-mails into the preview-pane, so I’m not accidentally opening junk. It also has another feature that helps for the random spam e-mail that I don’t identify properly. It by default doesn’t show images in e-mails unless it’s from a source I’ve approved. So junk mail that is opened doesn’t verify my e-mail address to the spammer as valid by downloading images.

I’ve taken unofficial polls a couple of times and I receive about ten percent of the volume of spam e-mail that most of my contemporaries do. Same level of exposure of our e-mail addresses, and the same Internet providers. The only difference I can find is that I’m more careful about how I handle e-mail, and I use a better e-mail client (they all use MS Outlook).