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How to Stop Spam in Its Tracks
I can’t stand spam, can you? I don’t mean the meat that’s so popular in Hawaii, I mean the constant overload of advertisements you get in your inbox.
No doubt you know this computer term .
The content of the messages varies from mortgage rates to enlarging various body parts, to pornography, and their numbers grow every day. Some experts estimate that junk email accounts for over 90% of all emails!
Spam is named after an old Monty Python sketch which took place in a diner where everything on the menu had spam in it. A group of vikings thinks so highly of spam that they sing a song about it at the top of their voices, making conversation close to impossible. Decades later, this reminded someone of how email in your inbox can get lost in all of the junk mail, so they nick-named it spam and the name stuck.
It can be hard to avoid getting your email address on *some* list. It’s not uncommon for many to get 50 to 100 junk email in a single day – I know some people who get over 300 every day! And the problem is growing worse.
Hapily there are ways for someone to limit how much spam they get. Here are a few tips:
* Never try to unsubscribe or ask to be removed. Those emails may include a link or a reply address to stop getting emails, but 90%either simply don’t work, or you’re just telling the spammers that they’ve got a live one.
*Never order anything you see in junk email, click through to the website, or in any way respond to the ad. With the cost of spamming being practically free, it’s no wonder they send out thousands at a time. Every order or click through to their website just encourages the spammers to send more and more.
*Try to avoid entering your email address on websites as much as possible. If you do, consider getting a second email account with Hotmail or a similar service. So you keep your real address more hidden.
Many websites offering contests, joke lists, free greeting cards, etc. sell your address without your permission.
* Online guest books are to be avoided at all costs. As an experiment I recently created a new email address and entered it on about five guestbooks I found with a Google search. Within 24 hours I was getting spam, and it grew to dozens a day within a week.
* The act of opening some junk email alerts the spammer, so they know they have a live one. So if your email program has a “work offline” menu option( You’ll often locate this in the File menu) select it before opening dubious emails. You can also disconnect from the internet completely, but unless you are still trapped in the backwaters of dialup, this may involve unplugging wires. Generally, the best option is to use the “offline” feature of your email program.
If you use a web-based email service like Hotmail, you won’t be able to go offline in this way. Check your mail options for a setting to turn off graphics in emails, or to display mail in plain text only. You might see an option labelled “don’t load remote images”, or words to that effect — if so, choose that.
These steps can help keep the spammers from knowing you’ve opened the message.
*Avoid forwarding emails to large numbers of people.
Not everyone realizes that when you forward a message, the email addresses of everyone who receives the message is visible to every person who reads it. If any of the recipients is a spammer, or if one of a friend’s computer is infected by certain viruses, they can harvest all of those addresses, including yours.
If you do send an email to multiple people, you can avoid revealing email addresses by entering addresses in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) area instead of To or CC. This will hide the list of addresses from everyone else.
If you’re sending a message from somebody on to others, you should copy and paste just the message into a new email window rather than hitting the forward button — this trims the message down and protects the privacy of others.
*To deal with the spam you already receive, most email programs allow you to create “filters” or “rules” that move incoming email into a specified folder or even right into the trash.
Setting filters up can be complicated, but the newer versions of many email programs, including Mozilla Thunderbird and Mac OS X Mail make it much easier.
The programs recognize patterns in spam, and use your address book as a white list of legit senders. Junk can be cleared from your inbox with a click. The more spam you mark, the better the program gets at automatically taking care of them. So you end up seeing a lot less junk than you used to.
Many internet providers also provide a spam filter which blocks email before it gets to your computer. The problem with this is that they often block legitimate mail and you may never know about it.
Because of this, I recommend using filtering software on your own computer, such as the two programs I just mentioned.
Ultimately, spam is a fact of modern life, and it’s next to impossible to avoid all of it, mostly because of what other people are doing with your email. If your current email address is about to collapse from the amount of spam you get, you might be forced to get a new one.
After that, if you follow the suggestions and computer tips above, you’ll have a good chance of keeping it under control. While a written article can never be a full replacement for something with video such as computer training cds I hope you found it helpful.
