While it's not possible to completely eliminate spam (unsolicited
commercial email), there are some precautions and steps you can take
to minimize it's impact:
1) Never, ever post your real email address to publicly accessible
forums or newsgroups, such as this one. For years now, spammers have
been using software utilities to scan such places to harvest email
addresses. It's a simple matter to disguise your posted email 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 email address.
3) Be especially leery of any offers from websites for free software,
services, information, etc, that require your email address, or that
require your email 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 email before downloading it
from the server. Spammers can even be blacklisted, so that any future
emails from them will be automatically 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
