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The most important thing to know about spam is, of course, what you can do to avoid it. If your email address is not yet in the hands of spammers, there is a lot you can do. If it already is, all you can do is to avoid common mistakes that may make the situation worse, and protect yourself with an antispam software that suits your needs.
In both cases, these five "golden rules" summarize what you need to know about spam. |
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Rule N.1: Never reply to a spam message. |
This is the master rule. You may be tempted to use the “remove” facility spammers frequently offer. Or you might be so upset to consider retaliating by sending large numbers of messages, or very large messages back to the spammer. Don’t do it.
In the first case, all you would obtain is to inform the spammer that the address is live, which is a very precious information. As a result, you’ll probably be included in other lists that will be sold at a higher price on the market.
The second case is not just un-ethical but it could even be illegal. Besides you would probably email somebody who hasn’t anything to do with the person who sent the spam message because spammers usually use a drop mailbox to get rid of possible replies. Sometimes they just use a random address that may belong to somebody else. |
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Rule N.2: Don't buy anything from spammers. |
Buying from spammers is risky. Among those that promote legitimate products and services there are those who pretend to offer you a chance to earn or make money, but in reality their main goal is take money from you. Not to mention those that promote pirated software, or attempt to get people to divulge their credit card details to sites run by fraudsters. And it’s not easy to find out which is which.
Besides, the only reason spammers send out all these messages is because they think it’s profitable. If people don't buy anything from them, they'll eventually go out of business. |
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Rule N.3: Do not use your email address in public places. |
| Basically do not use your email address on Websites, Usenet, IRC, Whois Databases etc. This is how spammers get your address. If you need to make your address public, it's better to create a new one that you can easily delete if it gets unusable. If you are giving your personal address to a company check if they have a privacy policy that explicitly states that they won’t sell or rent it to anybody. |
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Rule N.4: Never forward email chains, regardless how important they seem. |
| Most email chains are hoaxes. If you forward the message you receive you don’t just risk compromising your own email address, but also the address of people in the chain. |
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Rule N.5: Do not allow your mailer to automatically open http connections. |
Some mailers, such as Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, can display HTML messages. If the message contains a link to an outside website, your mailer will automatically try to open an http connection and retrieve the item, for example a picture. This could be a dangerous practice because even if you don’t want to contact the spammer your mailer will do it for you, possibly providing valuable information as well.
If you have a personal firewall you can block these http requests adding an outbound rule. But nowadays most email programs allow you to do this from the mailer itself, so just check among the options available. |
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| © 2003 Digit Design Ltd. All rights reserved. |
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