"OMG! YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS VID!"

"LOL! WTF is Going on??"

"FUNNY PICS! U HAV TO C!"

"ROFL I SAW YOU AT TEH PARTY!"

"IMPORTANT! NEW 'DEVISTATING' VIRUS GOING AROUND"

"CAT EATS GRAPE!"

"SEEN ON 20/20: MAGIC MIRACLE CURE!"

"DO YOU REMEMBER THE PARTY LAST WEEK?"

"YOU'VE REACHED A NEW PLATEAU"

Chances are, you're saying to yourself 'These titles seem somewhat familiar to me.' That's because these titles are actual titles taken from actual SPAM emails. Let's face it - we've all received an email from a friend/co-worker/family member who only wants to share something that they thought was funny or cute with you. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with that. You may have even found something funny or cute, or interesting and emailed that out as well (again, with all the best intentions). What you might not have realized is that by sending that email, you may be contributing to the amount of Email SPAM that you receive, as well as the overall amount of SPAM that every email account receives.

'Email SPAM' or 'Junk mail' are interchangeable terms for the same thing: Email you receive that you did not request or do not desire. SPAM is not just limited to email though - it includes any sort of unsolicited communication; instant messaging, faxes, automated phone calls, SMS/Text Messages, and even letters in the physical mail! Why do these things exist you may ask?  Well, it's because some people found an opportunity to profit off of a less informed, trustworthy, and somewhat gullible public. Of course I'm not referring to you though, right?

"I never give my email address out, or use it on any public forum though" are things you may say to yourself, and that would be a very effective way of preventing all SPAM. In fact - that may even be a good way to prevent any email from coming in at all! Let's look at a scenario: Your friend Jane sends you and one other person, Billy, a 'Funny Joke' email. You chuckle a little and then forward the email on to two of your other friends (Adam and Mary). They also chuckle a little, and each forward it on to two additional people (Samuel and Robert), who then in turn forward it on to an additional two people (Henry and Suzanne), and so on. You're first though might be "That doesn't sound so bad." Let's take a look at what is happening. For simplicity's sake, we'll only show the branches here;

Now again, the example above only shows one branch of what can happen when everybody is just sending two emails and the fourth person down one of the paths is a spammer. If we increase the number of emails each person sends out to 10, and the spammer is 100 spots down the chain then they would have hundreds, if not thousands of email addresses to start spamming.  Spammers also do not simply use their own list - they buy, sell, and trade their lists from each other so the number of email addresses they can spam can grow into the millions.  All of this, just from forwarding an email to a few people.

In this scenario, there are two main things you can do to make sure that you are not helping a spammer to get so many email addresses. The first thing is the easiest of them all - don't forward the message! If you do wish to forward the message, email it to yourself in the "To" field, and BCC anyone else you wish to share it with. The BCC stands for 'Blind Carbon Copy.' The recipient (and all recipients) sees that the message was send from you to yourself and does not see anyone else who received the message. A more advanced step to take would be to copy the content of the original email and paste that into a brand-new email. If everyone in the above example did that, then by the time Suzanne received the email, the only email address she would be able to obtain would be Samuel's.