Email Spam - Is there a way against it?

If I have to answer this question, my answer would be no. You cannot fight spam. Spam has been there from the time someone found out that it is cost effective to send hundreds / thousands of unsolicited letters if even 2-5% of the recipients buy from them as compared to other advertising media. Remember catalog mails, flyers, store advertisement?

We don't realise it, but it is a kind of spam that gets in our way of daily activities. We do have to spend time to sort through it and throw it away. You could have spent that time with your kid or wife instead. Why email spam is more frustrating is because there is almost no cost associated with it when compared with cost of production and number of emails sent out and secondly there is no charge to send it. As of today the spam emails amount to more than 85% of total email and the number is set to increase. Believe me.

I have heard options like electronic stamps for sending emails. It's just not practical. What can you and I do to fight spam in a more effective manner? Spam is not going to go away. The best we can do is to use tools to make it a little bit bearable. Compared to 3 years ago, the tools today are much more sophisticated and better. But the spammers are even more smarter than the tools. They work their ways around the tools and still send SPAM emails. Like they put a space between obvious words that SPAM filters catch or use variations of common words like for 500 they will write 5OO. Both look almost the same to human eye, but are totally different to the computer eye. You know what I mean.

There have also been services that declared war on Spam and promised a spam free environment by using spammers methods and tools against them. Remember Blue Security? The Israeli firm that tried that approach. They grossly underestimated the power of spammers. One russian spammer spam them so badly that it brought their entire email infrastructure on its knees and Blue Security conceded defeat and folded its operations.

The point I am trying to make though is you have to accept the fact that spam exists and will continue to exist no matter what we try. The only way to combat it is to make our tools better and most importantly IGNORE the spammers message and advertisement even if the product they are advertising is good and something you always wanted to buy. Someone somewhere clicks through their emails and they earn enough money to send another million emails. If we make it unprofitable for them to operate their spam rings, then only it will stop.

Waitaminute!!! I am talking about every person on this good earth who has a email address to ignore spam emails. Is it even possible? I don't think so. If you hate spam, then it is better to buy some good tools and organise your email so that all good emails that you want to receive go in places other than inbox and spam and unknown emails go to inbox. We cannot define what is bad, but we can certainly define what is good. Once we define what is good, then sort the good things so that you know what is bad and what is not so good.

Next I will talk about some tools that we can easily employ in the fight against spam.