Allan said:
My future daughter in law has a mother that continually
keeps getting spam. Is there any program that you may
know of to instal that will stop or slow down spam. Also
she keeps getting viruses and she cleans them out and the
next thing she knows is her firewall is down. I suspect
there is a virus or something in her system restore and
she needs to shut it off and boot into safe mode and the
do an antivirus scan. Her antivirus is up to date. I have
made a list to her daughter of spyware programs to get
and install.
I have tried lots of anti-spyware programs in the past, but the bottom
line for all of them is that they are, at best, a third or fourth line
of defense against spam. The first line of defense is the ISP. Try
to find an ISP that filters spam at the server level so that it never
gets downloaded to your computer in the first place. My ISP, Charter,
does spam filtering and gives its customers the option to implement
additional filters. Their filters are superb.
A second line of defense, recommended by many experts, is to be very
protective of your real e-mail address and not to use it in public
places such as websites or newsgroup. I have never followed this
advice.
For example, I'm using my real e-mail address right now
to post this response to your post. However, my ISP filters are so
good anyway that I rarely even see spam at the server level, much less
when I open Outlook 2003. But it is still good advice for most
people.
A third and crucially important line of defense is never, NEVER
respond to spam, not even to "unsubscribe." When you do, the POS who
sent it to you gets a confirmation that your e-mail address is
legitimate, and he will not unsubscribe you. Instead, he will sell
your e-mail address to other POSs who will then send you their spam as
well. So if spam e-mail penetrates your defense, just delete it.
A fourth line of defense is anti-spam programs, Outlook 2003 has a
very effective filter. Other good spam programs (especially if you
use Outlook Express) include Qurb (
www.qurb.com), Cloudmark
(
www.cloudmark.com), Norton's anti-spam program, and a few others that
aren't worth mentioning. My personal favorite, hands down, was
Cloudmark. Outlook and Outlook Express also have features that
enable the user to create his own filters, although doing so is
tedious and a real pain in the rear.
A fifth line of defense is to configure your e-mail program so that it
doesn't automatically download pictures from spam e-mail (e.g.
configure your e-mail to read all incoming e-mail as plain text). If
you have the latest version of Outlook or Outlook Expess, this will be
done for you automatically, although you always have the option to
download images.
Regarding the rest of your post, she almost certainly has crudware on
her hard drive. Everything you suggested is good advice. I
personally use the Microsoft antispyware program running in real time
and also Ad Aware SE. Your future daughter in law needs to use these
programs, and others, to get the crud off her hard drive an then
update all of her Windows XP software (including SP2 if she hasn't
already done so.
Ken
