Junk Email (Spam)
It is incredibly cheap to send millions of emails and inboxes around the world are filling up with junk mail. What can you do to protect yourself?
Firstly, don’t give out your primary email address. If websites are asking for an email address to register, create an account with a free provider such as Hotmail and use that. If it starts to fill with spam, just create another one. Don’t put your email address on your website without ‘munging’ or disguising it, there are programs which search the web harvesting email addresses which are then sold to junk emailers.
Secondly, if you do receive junk mail with a line such as ‘if you wish to be removed from this list, click here’, do not click on the link it may well validate your email address as a working one, which means it is worth more to the junk emailers. Just delete the message. Also, do not reply to these messages as more often than not they contain a false return address.
If you find yourself on the receiving end of junk mail what can you do?
Check whether your Internet Service Provider (ISP) offers a mail filtering service and switch it on. This will dramatically reduce the amount of junk in your inbox, but beware it may also catch a small number of legitimate messages too.
For Outlook users, there is a really useful piece of software called Spambayes. This will filter messages within Outlook, learning while it does which are spam and which are legitimate emails. It will also work with Outlook Express, but in a slightly different way, and the installation is not as easy as it is for the full version of Outlook
For advice on reducing spam in your inbox, call Viper Data.