Spam is a slang term for unsolicited commercial email. (It is not the same as SPAM™, a canned meat product from the Hormel Corporation. SPAM™ is good, spam is bad.)
Why Do I Get Spam?
Without your know it, your email address is widely distributed. You may sign up for electronic mailing lists which are distributed. If you post to an online forum or newsgroup, or included it when filling out a form on a commercial website, more than likely your address will wind up in a commercial mailing list. Some Windows viruses are believed to harvest email addresses from the files of the machines they infect and send them to spammers.
How Can I Make Spam Go Away?
You will probably never be able to completely eliminate spam from your inbox. Even the best of filters will only catch part of the junk mail sent to you. There are some steps you can take to reduce the amount of spam you receive.
Unsubscribe from groups you are no longer using:
Some of the mail you consider spam may be because you signed up for something on a webpage while requesting information or downloading a software package. If you really have subscribed to some newsletter and you no longer want to receive it, unsubscribe from it. Check the text of the message; there is often an unsubscribe link or an email address to send a message to be removed from the list. Do not try this on unsolicited email messages, since many spammers will simply use your unsubscribe request as an indication that your email address is active and send more spam.
Use an alternative email address in commercial webpages:
Instead of using your primary ICC email address to sign in to commercial web pages, use another account such as one of the free providers like Yahoo, Netscape, or Hotmail, and use that address instead. That way, you will keep your spam separate from the real messages. Remember to log in to those accounts periodically and delete the spam.
Use filters in your email client:
Most of the email clients you can use to read email give you filters to sort your mail into different mailboxes based on sender, subject, and other criteria. Those filters can be used to make spam go away as well. Both Outlook for faculty and staff and student webmail have these features.