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Does your work day begin with a thousand taps of the Delete key to remove the flood of spam that invades your inbox? Are you getting worn down trying to sort the important e-mails from the torrent of junk? Are you ready to delegate e-mail triage to a staff person? Then let's see what we can do to alleviate this growing problem.

What is spam? It is unsolicited commercial e-mail – electronic junk mail. It is stuff that you don't want to read. It may also contain a virus or other malware that can infect your computer, your network and those with whom you transact business by e-mail.

I am often asked, "How did these spammers get my e-mail address?" That's easy! You provide your e-mail with every order you place to purchase products or services online. You put your e-mail address on your website, and at the end of every e-mail you send. Your e-mail is listed on every social or business networking site you join, such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, Lawguru etc.

The evildoers have software tools called "bots" which scour the Internet looking for e-mail addresses and stuffing them into lists to be bought, sold and traded among the spam giants. All the bot does is look for e-mail addresses as it searches. It is relatively easy since e-mail has certain consistent formatting. There's a name at the front, an @ symbol, and an ending such as .com, .net, .edu, .org, etc. It's about the same as looking for a phone number or Social Security number. It's easy to recognize the known formatting for those items.

Tools and tips

We're not going to be able to completely stop spam. It's a bit like catching a cold – no matter how many times you wash your hands to avoid germs, you're still going to get sick from time to time. But let's consider some tools and techniques to manage spam:

First, never reply to spam. All that does is confirm that the spammer has reached a valid e-mail address. Please note that this is not the same as sending an "unsubscribe" to an e-mail list which you know to be valid. If you want to stop getting the monthly newsletter from your favorite hobby site, certainly send the "unsubscribe" request. However, if you receive an e-mail that is not from a vendor known to you, be very careful before you reply.

Second, it is likely that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) offers a free spam filtering service. They pre-screen your e-mail looking for known spam. Just as the spammers use bots to look for e-mail addresses, the good ISPs have tools to look for spam. They filter it out and put the junk into a separate mailbox for your scrutiny.

These filters aren't perfect. They do make mistakes. I've suffered from what are known as "false positives." This is nothing more than the spam filter making a decision that an e-mail from a client is spam and putting it in the segregated spam mailbox. And, yes, I've incurred the distress of a client or two who calling a day later inquiring as to why I had not responded to their e-mails. Sure enough, when I check through my hundreds of spam messages in the middle of the electronic haystack I find the important message. So from time to time you do have to scan the spam box for valid e-mails.

Many of the ISP filtering services permit you to create a "white list" of known contacts so that the spam filter will automatically pass e-mails from those contacts directly into your regular e-mail inbox. Likewise, if you have certain businesses or people with whom you do not wish to have contact, you may be able to add their e-mail address to a "black list," which will automatically stuff those e-mails into the spam folder.

Virus concerns

Spam can be more than an annoyance. It can be downright fatal to your computer! A virus or other malware can be attached or embedded within spam. A recent article in eWeek noted that, "According to researchers at Symantec, one in every 617 spam messages now contains malicious code." Therefore, it's a good idea to configure your e-mail program so that it does not automatically open and display the full contents of every e-mail without your permission.

How does an e-mail infect your computer? Here's an example. The Subject line of the e-mail says, "Update from the Supreme Court." You assume it's valid and don't notice that the e-mail ends in ".ru" and not the usual ".com." That means the e-mail is from Russia and there are a lot of spammers sending evil stuff from that region.

You click and see there's a document attached. Of course you want to read it. When you open it there's only one line of readable text and you now know it was a waste of time. However, what you didn't notice was that this e-mail installed a little bit of software on your computer. All of a sudden your computer slows down. It takes a long time to open your word processor, save a file or access your time and billing system.

This means you computer has been "captured" by the attached malware. It is now using your computer and your e-mail address to spew more spam to everyone in your address book. And those people receiving the spam and malware assume it is valid since it came from you. So be sure to keep your virus protection software installed, running and updated! It will reduce this type of risk significantly.

Online services

Another method to reduce spam is to use an on-line service. A well known name in this field is Postini. In fact, they were so well known and so well respected that Google bought them. Postini is now the engine behind the massive Google Gmail service. The huge volume of e-mail processed through Google Gmail gives them a never ending supply of data to continuously update their filtering process to provide state-of-the-art protection.

While doing some research for this article I polled my colleagues on the ABA Solosez e-mail list about how they handle spam. My friend Mike Koenecke offered an ingenious way to manage the problem. He set up a free account Gmail account with Google. He forwards all of his inbound e-mail to his Gmail account. Postini sorts the wheat from the chaff and then automatically forwards the good stuff to his ultimate destination e-mail account.

Spam and the common cold will never be cured. But we can take steps to reduce our exposure to both and to live a more healthy life in both the real and the electronic world.