As a general definition, spam is unsolicited email and sometimes referred to as Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE). These emails are usually advertisements of a varied nature ranging from healthcare to financial matters.

Do refer to the following IDA webpages for more information:

• E-mail Marketing
• FAQs - E-mail Marketing
• iDA FAQs on Telecommunications and Postal Services - Unsolicited Emails/ Messages/ Calls

There is no existing law in Singapore against sending spam, however, spamming may be considered an offence if it affects the normal operations of the destination system.

Your address may not be visibly listed in the email because it is in the BCC field which does not show the recipients' email addresses.

Inserting a fake email address into the From field of an email (otherwise known as spoofing) is commonly employed by spammers to mislead recipients and avoid complaints about the spam.

Email address spoofing is easily done and does not require your email password. However, as a precaution, we would advise that you change your password should you receive an email that was apparently sent from your email address.

• Your emails address was sold as part of an email database
• The previous owner of your email address had signed up to receive such emails
• The website you signed-up at sold your email address to other companies - many sites include a fine-print notice allowing them to distribute your email address to their partners
• Someone signed you up to receive these emails

There are numerous ways for a spammer to get your email address:

• Spyware that has been unknowingly installed in your computer
• Social engineering
• By having access to the same computer you have used e.g. in a cyber cafe
• The previous owner of the email address may have signed-up for some online services
• IRC, chatrooms or instant messengers
• Mailing lists
• White and yellow pages
• Online or paper forms e.g. contest entries
• Personal web page
• Guessing i.e. the spammer runs a program to generate all possible userids beginning with each alphabet
• Newsgroup postings
• Cookies stored on your computer
• Guestbooks
• Email databases - once your email address has been obtained it may be stored in a database and sold worldwide

More details are available at How do spammers get people's email addresses

Following are some basic precautions to take:

• Make it more difficult for the spammer to guess your userid - try not to use a common word or name e.g. apple, jennifer etc.
• Be wary when revealing your email address online, read the site's Privacy Policy carefully to determine how the company will use your personal information.
• Use a form instead of listing your email address on your personal website.

Do refer to the following articles for more ways to safeguard your Internet privacy:

• Internet Privacy
• Understanding Security and Privacy

Changing your UserID or email address may help reduce the volume of spam you receive, especially if your current email address was previously used by someone else or your UserID is a common name or word. You may change your SingNet userid online at My Account.

You are advised to use this unsubscribe option only if you feel that the company is a trusted one and would immediately remove your email address from their mailing list upon request. In many cases, the unsubscribe link is not a real option to unsubscribe. More often than not, the spammer uses this method to find out whether the email address is active.

Spam filter

To reduce the volume of spam to your mailbox, you can set up filters in your email client e.g. Outlook Express, Eudora etc. to detect and trash spam. The most common function is to move the email to the Deleted Items folder - this means that you still have to download the emails and clear the Deleted Items folder. Some email clients allow you to automatically delete filtered emails without downloading it, however, you will not have a chance to confirm that the email is spam, nor can you retrieve it if it was mistakenly deleted.

Setup a filter on your email software or webmail to block emails based on email address, domain or content. For content filters, besides words linked to pornographic content, you can also filter emails with unsubscribe functions e.g. Filter out phrases such as "click here for removal" or "to be removed". .

Instructions on setting up filters or message rules are available in the Help section of your email client. Search for 'filter' to find up the instructions. Do be careful when setting up filters to ensure that a legitimate email is not accidentally blocked/ deleted.

Anti-spam software

Other than setting filters on your email client, you may also use anti-spam software:

• Despammed.Com Mail Filtration Service
• iHateSpam (Sunbelt)
• JunkSpy
• MailWasher
• Matador (Mail Frontier)
• Norton Spam Alert (Bundled with Norton Internet Security 2003)
• SpamAssassin/ SpamAssassin Pro
• SpamButcher
• SpamCatcher (Mailshell)
• SpamCop
• SpamKiller (McAfee)
• SpamNet
• The Spam Filter©

There are no filters or software on the market that can completely block spam from your mailbox because spammers use a great variety of methods which are constantly evolving to ensure that the spam reaches you.

You may report the spammer to his Internet Service Provider (ISP) by providing the full email headers and the contents of the spam.

If the spam originated from a SingNet subscriber, you may report it at the Internet Abuse Incident Report page. Please read the instructions carefully to ensure that you provide all the relevant information. However, if the spam was not sent by a SingNet subscriber, you should report the spammer directly to his ISP.

You can also subscribe to spam-reporting services such as SpamCop

A spam report that contains the full email headers and contents will be investigated by the Internet Security team. If the spam is traced to a SingNet account, we will take appropriate action including issuing warnings, suspending or terminating the offender's account. If the spam did not originate from a SingNet account, we will inform the offender's ISP of the incident for their investigation.

There are legal restrictions preventing the release of a subscriber's particulars unless pursuant to an official request by the police or a Court Order, etc. If you feel that you have grounds for legal action against the spammer, please consult your lawyer for further advice.

Such postings may also be considered as spam and should be reported to the newsgroup moderator to be removed or barred. If you want to report the incident to the spammer's ISP you should obtain the headers and report the posting in the same way you do for email spam. For more information on newsgroup spam, do refer to The Net Abuse FAQ.

SingNet has introduced an Anti-Spam value-added service which provides maintenance-free spam filtering. Emails identified as spam will be filtered into a Mass Mail folder in the SingNet webmail, MyCommunicator, so that you need not download the spam. Click here to find out more about the service.