What is spam?
Spam emails are unwanted emails that are distributed in a large quantity. The term “unwanted” is, of course, very subjective. Typical examples are spam emails with content that is related to pornography, pharmaceuticals, dubious financial transactions etc. In most cases, spam emails are distributed with fraudulent intentions.

But there are also cases where reputable companies or private users send mass e-mails. National laws give various definitions as to precisely when unwanted email is defined as spam. Ask your national awareness node for further details.

What can I do against spam?
The most important tools against spam are “spam filters”. You can activate them in your email program and your email provider usually offers anti-spam options as well. Contact your email provider for detailed information.

Be careful: spam filters never work completely accurately. They may categorise some emails as spam even though they are definitely not unwanted. On the other hand, they don’t always recognise spam and may catch some “wanted” mail in the filter. If you are waiting for an email that hasn’t arrived, it is worth checking in your junk or spam folder to see if it has been put there.

It is wise to protect yourself against spam (see question “How can I prevent spam?”) Altogether though, there is unfortunately no complete protection against spam.

How can I prevent spam?
In general, be very careful about publishing your email address.

Use two email addresses. You should keep one of these for important communication with friends, colleagues etc., and only use the other address if you leave entries in public forums, guest books, registrations etc. If you receive too many spam emails at the second address, you can just delete it and register for a new one. For this purpose you can use free mail services, such as Hotmail or Yahoo!.

Never answer spam emails(i.e. don’t respond to complain) because that would only confirm that the email address is valid.

If possible, avoid having your email address appear on websites. You can “mask” it on websites so that programs which search automatically for addresses to build spam mailing lists are not able to recognize them. You can, for example, use a graphic image to show your email address instead of using text that can be cut and pasted, or you could spell it out in letters only e.g. "john dot public at xy dot com" instead of "john.public@xy.com".

Be careful when giving out your mobile phone number too. SMS spam is already becoming a problem on mobile phones.

Now go to your national node’s website to find useful links and further information.