You might not have considered how your next vacation could increase your spam load. When you were booking that sunny getaway in Florida, little did you know that while away, your e-mail address might get added to thousands of spam databases - all because you used an email auto responder.

Email Auto Responders have long been used as a convenient way of informing those who might write to you that you're out of the office and that you'll respond to their email upon your return. What a great convenient tool - right? Well, recently spammers have caught on to this and are now using your auto reponder against you.

Think about this: You go on vacation from your Greater New Bedford based business planning to return rested and re-invigorated. But upon your return you find that spam levels have soared even higher that the dizzying heights of pre-vacation. What's happened???

While you are away, your handy little auto responder has been replying to every single email that you've been sent. Each email has been responded to with a notice stating that you're partying it up in Key Largo and will be back in a week.

But did you realize that every email means EVERY email - spam included? How many spam messages do you typically receive each day? With each received spam, your mail server is responding automatically and is actually confirming the existence of your email address to the spammer. Up until now, the spammer has been guessing that there MIGHT be an actual email account at your address - now however, he/she is certain of it. Your address now gets moved to an even more valuable CONFIRMED email spam database and is sold on to other spammers as a confirmed address. Get ready for the influx of additional spam - and guess what? You invited it! You unintentionally corresponded with a spammer.

It's a real shame that spam is proliferating like it is. Estimates now show that upwards of 94% of all email worldwide is actually spam. Your use of tools like auto responders now have to be re-considered.

Take our advice - next time you go on vacation, leave the auto responder turned off.