We all get email we don’t want. That email from your teacher telling you your assignment is late? Unwanted! Spam is email that is unwanted and is sent to multiple people.

Spam spam spam spam

The name came from the British Comedy group Monty Python. They had a song that talked about the meat in a can called spam and repeated the word an awful lot. The people who dealt with this in the early days of the Internet were fond of the song and the name just stuck. It’s spam.

It’s annoying and it can be dangerous. Spam can deliver malware to your system, and isn’t that just too rude for words. There’s two ways it can do it. One is to have an attachment and hope that you download it. If you download it, there’s a good chance you might get malware from it.

The other way is to hope you click on a link in the email. If you do that, you’ll probably download malware.

Either way, they want you to install malware on your system so that they can use your system for their own means.

So now comes the hard part, how do you recognize spam? Well, there are programs that do that for you. Most places that provide email have these in place, because they don’t like spam either. Gmail has one that puts all spam email into a quarantine area to keep it separate from your safe email.

Spam Quarantine

It only keeps spam email around for 30 days before deleting it. That’s because these programs aren’t perfect. They do their best to detect spam from not spam, but they aren’t perfect.

We know spam contains URLs for you to click on, but what if your friend sends you a link to an Imgur photo album for you to check out? Then the spam program could send your friends email to the quarantine area.

On the other hand, sometimes spam doesn’t get sent into the quarantine area. If you get an email with a random link on it, don’t click! If you’re not sure that the original sender sent you that, call (or text) and ask! Same for attachments. It’s better to be safe than infected.