SPAM -- Not Just Canned 'Meat' Anymore...
What not to do
What to do
Email accounts
SPAM filters
Don’t post online
About SPAM:
Spam is a bane on all people who use email to regularly communicate for work, family or pleasure. SPAM is email you did not request. It could be telling you to buy a PC, offering to enhance your love life, , asking you to forward a sentimental story, or tell you how the world is about to end if you do not sign a petition. It could also be more malicious and ask for personal information posing as a bank or other financial institution (phishing) or deliver a harmful file (aka virus / worm / trojan / malware / spyware ) which does damage to your software or steals personal data.
What NOT to do:
Do not ever reply to SPAM. Even if it has a link here which says something to the effect of “click here to be removed” – DO NOT TRUST IT!!! It will only tell the spammers that your email address is legitimate and they can pass it around to more of their devious friends. If you use a web-based email service such as hotmail or gmail, there are typically links to “Report SPAM” – use those links as the large email providers can then blacklist the senders.
What you should do:
Set up multiple email accounts. I personally recommend 3 different email accounts for the average email/internet user. An occasional email user could get by combining the 2nd and 3rd emails. Essentially, you rank people and websites by how well you trust them and how valuable it is to receive email from them.
Email Accounts:
1. This email is only for people you trust – family, friends, co-workers, business contacts. This would be your primary email address that you would give to people. This could be a free email account, one provided by your Internet Provider (DSL, Cable, MSN, earthlink, etc), or one provided by your employer or school. Note: depending on your situation, it is often helpful to have one primary account at work, and one primary account for home use.
2. This email is for purchases you make online, newsgroups you subscribe to, and any other place where you want to get email from the person, group, or organization, but cannot fully trust the source. Typically, this is a free email account like gmail, hotmail, or yahoo that you could check via a web service, and not download onto your computer.
3. This final email is for anything which you do not trust the source, nor do you care to receive email from the group. Examples would be signing up for access to websites which require a valid email account, filling out drawings, buying stuff online from unverified companies. This would always be a free account (gmail, hotmail, yahoo) – never a work or school account as you cannot control what types of emails you will receive.
SPAM Filters:
Modern versions of Microsoft Outlook provide SPAM filters, as do AOL and most free web-based email services. Unfortunately, a SPAM filter will never eliminate all the SPAM, and will always accidentally mark something as SPAM which you really wanted to see. So, even with a filter applied, you must still, on a regular basis, sift through the SPAM and see if it accidentally caught one of your friends, or a newsgroup you subscribe to. I highly recommend using filters, but if your email address is already heavily spammed, the best thing to do is just start over with a fresh email address.
Posting your email address online:
Sometimes, you want to put your email address online. Maybe you have a personal family site and want your aunts and uncles to be able to tell you how cute your new baby is, or maybe you are on the “Contact Us” page of your company website. Either way, there are programs out there that scan the web and look for email addresses to SPAM. There are two easy solutions to this problem.
1. The first is not to use your primary email address. Let’s say your email address is yourname@yoursite.com – instead, you could put sales@yoursite.com or family@yoursite.com – then have those emails forward to your true email account or a secondary email account.
2. Don’t write out your email address in a way it can be found – the most basic way to do that is instead of writing yourname@yoursite.com – you write yourname AT yoursite DOT com – most people will recognize they just put it together to get your email address. The second way, which will look like a normal hyperlink is to use javascript to create your web address. This is obviously more professional as it still appears, when a human looks at the website, that it is a normal hyperlink – a computer program looking for email address will have a much harder time finding it. You can use the following script, provided courtesy of Joe Maller at http://www.joemaller.com (please included his credit), on your website. Just change “emailserver.com” and “yourname” and it will work just fine.