"Unsolicited commercial e-mail" that sent in bulk to numerous recipients without request/permission is called SPAM. A person who sends spam is called a Spammer.

A Spammer collects email address from websites, chat rooms, newsgroups and also using some viruses which copies users address books and send to the spammer. They also use programs to generate random email address. They also use software to crawl or scan websites for email address.

How to reduce the amount of spam you get?

1). Don’t give your regular/personal email-id to websites like chat rooms, blogs, forums, newsgroups etc.

2). If possible create a dedicated email id for Chat rooms, Signups and other online activities.

3). When you get spam from a person or a company that you have never heard or deal with then never click on any link in that email. If you click a link in a spam email this action will let spammer know that your email id is active and you will get more spam.

4). Never reply to spam emails, this also will let spammers know that this email id is active and they will send more spam to you.

5). Image spam- Some spammers use images to detect whether an email id is active or not. If you open these emails with images, your email application tries to retrieve images from spammer’s server machine and this will let spammer detect active email id. Configure your email application’s ‘default view’ in ‘Text mode’; in some email application there is a facility to disable images.

The golden rule against spam..

6). Don’t Open emails from unknown sender. Just delete it.

7). Install an Anti-Spam Software.