Greetings --
While it's not possible to completely eliminate spam (unsolicited
commercial e-mail), there are some precautions and steps you can take
to
minimize it's impact:
1) Never, ever post your real e-mail address to publicly accessible
forums
or newsgroups, such as this one. Spammers use software utilities to
scan
such places to harvest e-mail addresses. It's a simple matter to
disguise
your posted e-mail address so that these software "bots" can't obtain
anything useful. For example, insert some obviously bogus characters
or
words into your reply address, for example: "(e-mail address removed)."
2) Never, ever reply to any spam you receive, even to "unsubscribe"
or
"remove" yourself from the spammers' address lists; you'll only
compound the
problem. If spammers had any intention of honoring the your desire
not to
receive spam, they wouldn't have become spammers in the first place.
When
you reply to a spammer, all you're doing is confirming that he/she has
a
valid, marketable e-mail address.
3) Be especially leery of any offers from websites for free software,
services, information, etc, that require your e-mail address, or that
require your e-mail address so you can "login" to access the offered
service
and/or information. Many such sites are supplementing their income by
collecting addresses to sell to the spammers. (Of course, not all
such
sites have under-handed motives; it's a judgment call. If the offer
seems
"too good to be true," it's most likely a scam.)
4) DO forward any and all spam, with complete headers, to the
originating
ISP with a complaint. Not all ISPs will make an effort to shut down
the
spammers, but many will. One tool that makes forwarding such
complaints
fairly simple is SpamCop (
http://spamcop.net).
4) Another useful tool is MailWasher (
http://www.mailwasher.net).
This
utility allows you to preview your e-mail before downloading it from
the
server. It includes the ability to bounce spam back to the spammer,
simulating a bad e-mail address, which leads the spammer to remove you
from
his/her mailing list. Spammers can even be blacklisted, so that any
future
e-mails from them will be automatically bounced and deleted from the
server.
5) Within Outlook Express, add any spammers to your Blocked Senders
list,
so the their messages are automatically deleted from the server
without
being downloaded to your PC.
Bruce Chambers
--
Help us help you:
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on
having both at once. -- RAH