IT
Charles Zealey, of ITSolve, on business and personal computing.
SPAM, and I’m talking about unwanted bulk e-mail rather than a sandwich filling, is conservatively estimated to be over 80 per cent of e-mail traffic on the internet. My own experience suggests it may be even higher than that. From being virtually unknown 15 years ago, the internet now sees some 10 billion spam e-mail messages a day.
Spam is bad
It may seem obvious, but spam is bad news: it fills inboxes using valuable storage space and bandwidth, it requires time to sort through and weed out, it increases the risk of valuable e-mails being missed, it can often carry viruses or other forms of malicious attack and it often contains unwanted, disturbing or offensive material. I could go on.
“How did they get my address?”
Spammers use a variety of techniques to get hold of e-mail addresses. If it is advertised on a website (e.g. your own or business directory sites) it is likely you will be ‘spammed’. If you subscribe to internet chat rooms or bulletin boards you are at risk. Or perhaps a contact has you in their address book and have had their computer compromised by a virus or other attack during which your address was 'harvested'.
“What can I do?”
There are a number of techniques you can use to protect yourself from spam. None of them are perfect – you will always get spam. But with care you can significantly reduce the volume.
Take great care what you do with your e-mail address. Only advertise it on the internet if it is strictly necessary.
Consider using a second e-mail address for those times when you have to give an e-mail address to someone you do not know and trust. Or, if you have the facility, use a unique e-mail address each time you divulge it. That way you can identify transgressors.
Never reply to spam, not even to 'unsubscribe'. Reputable organisations will honour the unsubscribe request, but spammers will take it as encouragement that the e-mail address is in-use and send more.
Use an e-mail client (like Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird) with a junk mail filter and train it properly
Subscribe to an e-mail filtering service – preferably one with a multi-layered approach using blacklists, grey-listing or other of the various techniques aimed at identifying spammers, together with analysis of the message itself for common signs of spam.
Spam is a fact of life, but these simple steps will help you do something to control it.
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