“Spam” is an unwanted, unsolicited email message. If you’ve had your email address for awhile, you can receive up to hundreds of spams a day. Here is how to recognize a fraudulent email, and solutions for both managing and avoiding spam.

How to Recognize Spam:

By the FROM line:

• You don’t recognize the name of the sender.
• The sender’s email address has gibberish, like aserjglsk@hotmail.com.
• The address ends in .ru or another international extension.
• You receive the same message from several people.

By the SUBJECT line:

• It starts with RE: and doesn’t contain a message subject you yourself already sent.
• The email promotes a product you don’t need or want.

By the MESSAGE line:

• Look for broken English.
• Your bank will NEVER lose your account info and need you to type it in again.
• You did NOT win a sweepstakes.
• Do not help anyone from Africa.
• If there’s a hyperlink, hold your cursor over it without clicking and look at the address in the lower left corner of the window. If it’s long, has code, and does not start with a simple http://www.macpac.com, it’s probably fake.

What you can do about SPAM:

1. Never Reply or unsubscribe. That shows your email address was valid, so they’ll use it again. It is OK to unsubscribe from emails from companies you did business with.
2. Add trusted people and companies to your Address Book.
3. Avoid filling in sweepstakes and contest forms on websites. Most of the time, the whole reason they’re holding a drawing is to gather emails to sell.
4. Create a free email account on hotmail or gmail to use for online purchases or entry forms so that your personal email address stays private.
5. Enable your ISP’s Spam Filter so that potential spam messages are filed into a Junk or Bulk folder. But, do look through it periodically to save emails you really DO want.
6. Mark Spam as Junk and mark good messages as Not Junk. Your email program will learn over time.
7. If you’re Forwarding an email, erase everyone else’s address from the message history. That way no one can harvest emails from your messages!
8. Apple Mail has a Bounce command on the Message menu (or you can add a button to your toolbar). If you Bounce a spam message, the sender will get a message back saying that your address was Undeliverable. This may get you removed from some lists.
9. Turn off images in the Preview Pane. When you view images, they come from the sender’s server and it registers your email address as legitimate.
10. Consider third-party Spam management software such as SpamSieve, especially if you have your own domain.

If this message is in your Junk folder right now, please add training@macpac.com to your address book!