How to Stop Spam in Seven Steps
Are you like a lot of people, and detest spam? The flood of junk emails you see every day is what I mean, not the meat people in Hawaii love to eat so much.
Of course I’m sure you’ve heard of this common computer term .
The content of the messages varies from interest rates to enlarging various body parts, to adult images, and their numbers grow every day. Some experts estimate that spam accounts for over 90% of all emails!
Spam is named after an old sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus which took place in a diner where everything on the menu had spam in it. A group of people dressed as vikings boisterously sing a song about spam, making conversation almost impossible. Years later, this reminded someone of how email in your inbox can get lost in all of the junk mail, so they called it spam and the name stuck.
It can be hard to avoid getting your email address on *some* list. It’s commonplace for many people to get 50 to 100 pieces of spam in just one day – I know some people who get over 300 every day! And it’s growing worse.
Fortunately here are a few tips for people to reduce how much spam they get. Here are a few tips:
* Never try to unsubscribe or ask to be taken off the list. Those emails may include a link or a reply address to unsubscribe, but most either just don’t function, or you’re just telling the spammers that they have a live one.
*Never order anything you see in spam, click through to the website, or in any way respond to the ad. Spammers send out millions of emails at a time, and it costs them almost nothing. Even just clicking a link in one of those emails is enough to encourage them to send even more.
*Try to avoid entering your email address on websites as much as possible. If you do, consider getting a second email account with Windows Live Mail or a similar service. So you can give an alternative address.
Many websites offering contests, joke lists, free greeting cards, etc. harvest and sell your email address.
* Never put your name in a guest book on a website. 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.
* Simply glancing at the body of a junk email can send a signal to the spammer letting them know you opened it. So if your email program has a “work offline” option( the file menu is a good place to look for this) click 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 cables. The best option is to use the “offline” feature of your email program.
If you use a web-based email service like Windows Live Mail, 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. Blocking remote images is one way it’s described — turn that option on if you see it.
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 applications, 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. You can use a click to clear junk. The more spam you mark, the better the program gets at automatically taking care of them. You’ll end up with less junk mail than before.
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 free computer tips above, you’ll have a good chance of keeping it under control. While a written article might not quite work as well as something with video like a computer training cd I hope you found it made sense.
