Victims of spam mails would often ask where spam mails come from. All they know is that they have never given out their email address to other web sites or individuals online. How come they still suffer from receiving tons of unsolicited emails from people or companies they don’t know? With the rising clamor on how to stop spams, IT companies have designed various products to aid the victims of spam mails. Spam blockers have proliferated in the market and perhaps everyone who is using the internet has equipped their system with this software as a solution to stop spam mails.

Now, going back to the hanging question on how spammers gather thousands of legitimate email addresses of internet users. There are various ways how they do the job actually and one of the most common ways is to gather addresses from chain letters. If you are fond of reading and forwarding chain letters and other prank emails, you are actually helping these spammers to gather more addresses. If you would notice, forwarded emails would contain all the addresses of everyone who have received the same emails. Thus, this makes one good source for internet scammers to further increase their mailing list.

It is recommended that whenever you receive these kinds of emails, better yet put a stop to it by deleting it instead of forwarding it. By doing such, you are helping stop spam. So, whenever you receive suspicious emails, do not click on any links in that mail. Doing so will open a window for online spammers to invade your mailbox. Spammers are also spying on social networking sites where internet users would normally post their email addresses. This is such a perfect venue for them to get more data. In this case, making a secondary email address for your self is highly encouraged.

You can utilize free email accounts such as Yahoo and Hotmail. This secondary email account you can use when you want to join online forums or whenever you sign up for something where your address is required. There may be instances that you would want to subscribe to a certain web site; you may use your secondary email in order to activate your application. Having secondary email addresses can truly stop spam on your primary address. For affiliates who are obliged to post their email address in order to keep in contact with their prospective customers, you can stop spam by embedding your email address in an image that will make it difficult to read for OCR (optical character recognition).

In addition, you may also utilize CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). This is commonly used by many online marketers as an effective spam blocker for their web site. This method may cause a very minimal inconvenience to your customers or subscribers, but its benefits will surely outweigh the said inconveniences. There are many other possible sources of spams and spammers are definitely working overtime to create new techniques in sending spam mails. Give extra effort to stop spam or at least limit exposure to spam for a better and hassle-free online business.