When does an email message become a SPAM (or a "Junk") email message?

Email activity (the sending and receiving of email messages) is almost certainly the biggest form of data traffic on the internet, and of course we all know about that dreaded "Junk" email that can fill up your inbox with New messages every day. So how do we deal with them, and how do we make sure we're not spamming?

Of course if you've got a good Spam system within your email servers (preferably) or some sort of guard on your local machine the problem is reduced, or in many cases removed completely. The only problem is that there is NO system whatsoever that can determine what is truly junk (or SPAM) or what is not?. For example Junk to one person could be valuable information to another.

There are of course the obvious candidates that are pretty much junk to almost everybody! (such as the Viagra/emails of a sexual nature, selling something; the phishing emails that try to hide themselves as your trusted bank or favourite transactional site, where they are trying to gain financial advantage by having access to your login account details.. the list goes on.. )

But then there are now many genuine "mass mailers" out there that feel that this method of communication is vital for the growth and development of their businesses, and most businesses would agree that regular product and sales updates from their suppliers (and potential suppliers) is useful information, but that may sometimes be considered junk whenever their volume and regularity increase beyond a reasonable level.

The obvious no-no's that firmly place emails into the "junk" category are ones that fit the following criteria:

• They appear to be mass mailing to just about any address they can find on any database, and are totally non-discriminating on the subject content of the message as to it's relevance to the recipient
• The senders address is disguised often to be some cool name relevant to the content of what they are sending, or (more horrifically) hijacking YOUR email address as to be that of the sender
• It is not possible to REPLY to any of these messages, as this feature is blocked by the sender (or their mail system). Often they will have numbers as part of their address so it's easy to dynamically change address, as they avoid getting caught (e.g. jbloggs6536@websitename.com; which then changes to jbloggs6537@websitename.com on their next spamming session, as the previous one has already expired)

Opt-in Lists: These are lists from websites that you sign up to receive email from.

Opt-in lists are the only true way to eliminate spam, it has been argued, but I will be the first to admit, that I have opted in to (at a guess) less than 5% of the emails I receive that are NOT spam (i.e. one's that I want to, or don't mind receiving). Hence it could be accepted that any email received that does NOT generally fit into the above criteria is NOT a junk email. You comments would be welcome on this one! (click on "comments" below to post a comment).