Up until recently, spam was considered to be a form of precooked meat made by Hormel Foods Corporation. It did not have the best of public images then and neither does it now. The more common definition of spam or spamming, in the modern world, is the sending of many unsolicited messages indiscriminately - although the meat has had a surprising surge in popularity of late.

Spam is not only annoying but also very costly. The European Union has estimated the costs of spam at around ten billion euros per year, worldwide. This is largely due to the demands dismissing and deleting the spam puts on the time of employees. Moreover, companies are forced to pay for antispam software that must be continuously updated in order to keep one, small step ahead of would-be spammers.

Spam emails, just like any other email, also take up space on your server. If you are receiving a lot of them and do not find the time to delete them, then one day you may fight your site has gone down. This means, not only can no one access your site in order to purchase anything but any genuine orders or enquiries that are sent to you, via email, will not make it. This will mean that you have wasted money on cheap web hosting that you cannot use and that you are losing money, while your site is offline.

Enough scare mongering. What can you do about spam? For most small business, the single most effective thing they can do is to block themselves. What I means by this is to block the receipt of emails from your domain, other than those accounts which you have set up yourself. Spammers often try to hide their spam in this way - hoping that you will believe the message to be from a coworker.

Blocking emails from your own domain is relatively easy using cPanel, simply click mail then the ‘default address’ option followed by ’set default address’. Now, choose the domain name in the menu and enter ‘:fail: no such address here’ into the ‘to’ field.