This article first defines what spam email is and then explains how to control spam e-mail on your PC.

Spam e-mail is also known as bulk or junk e-mail and is unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant, or inappropriate emails, especially commercial advertising emails sent in very large quantities i.e. thousands or millions of the same email.

If you receive spam email it usually indicates that that you have supplied you email address to someone who may have then sold on your email address to some other group. You may also just receive a spam email as a result of the sender generating likely email addresses.

Some basic steps to avoid receiving spam emails are:

1. Only give your email address to those people or organisations you trust.

2. Ideally never open a spam email and definitely never reply to spam email or use any unsubscribe option in the email, as all this does is confirm that your email address works and hence they may send you more spam emails.

3. Set your email program like Microsoft Outlook Express to not display the “Preview Panel” (See Menu item View – Layout…) because just opening a spam email might be enough to send information back to the sender that your email address is valid.

Another tip is to setup an extra email address that you will be happy to drop if you start receiving spam emails to that address. You then use your main email address to friends, family and business and the extra one for everything else such as registering with websites etc. In this way you main email address is less likely to get spam emails and you could always replace the extra one with a new email address.

If you are receiving spam emails and wish to keep your current email address, then you will need to scan your incoming emails with some spam control software.

Such spam control software must be easy to install and then must detect and quarantine any spam emails. The spam email detection techniques must give a low false positive spam email detections i.e. it should rarely detect a valid email as spam.

Usually the detected spam emails are placed in a spam email folder within your email program such as Outlook. You can then look at the list of emails in this folder just to check that none look like valid emails (remembering item 3 above). The spam control software should then allow you to delete all the spam emails in that folder.

An example of Spam Control software which is suitable for use with Outlook, Outlook Express and the new Windows Mail in Vista is SpamBully click here for a FREE download trial.

SpamBully is a good defence against unwanted email intrusion. It utilises modern technology and detection methods.

The software is easy to install and integrates well with your email client application (Outlook or Outlook Express, Vista Mail). There are no complicated rules to setup and manage.

Click here to visit the SpamBully wibsite where you can see a full list of features and watch a demo video before downloading your FREE trial.