Anyone with an email address knows that spam is. If you have a blog or other sort of website than you are most likely on a very personal first name basis with spam. Things like - Viagra! It works!!!! and Make calls from home and make 7,00000000 dollars a day! It works!!! - often greet me in the morning. Some are well thought out, the subject might contain Hi! (your name) which for a split second actually catches your attention. Or it might start out with something like, You’ve won! But as crafty as spam is, it can never really hide its true nature, to annoy the heck out of you and clog your inbox, oh and to fish for email addresses of course.

Obviously, don’t ever ever reply to spam. Do not write back saying, no thank you I don’t want to make 7,0000000 phone calls a day. If you do this you will get 7,0000000 more spam emails a day.

Even if you have a great spam filter, stay on top of it and empty it regularly. Oftentimes a “real” email may get misdirected and end up in your spam folder (has happened to me more than once). If this happens you don’t want to have to look through the 1,000 spam emails hanging out in your spam folder that you never deleted. As annoying as it is, empty it as soon as anything appears in the folder. Trust me, it will save you some aggravation later.

Laugh. Laugh at the spam emails. It will make the act of having to go through and delete them slightly less irritating. Some are funny and clever, some make absolutly no sense, are in another language or are just gross. But don’t let them get you down! Laugh at the ridiculousness of someone sitting at their computer day after day making up programs that will email thousands or even millions of users each day with spam, for no good reason. That person is wacked! So laugh at them.

Add to del.icio.us!