| Wednesday, January 11, 2006 |
| This week's Tech Check: How to avoid spam. |
Anti-spam tips / Too much Spam!
Spam Prevention: (keep scrolling down for tips if your inbox is already full, or if you need free anti-spam programs)
1. Be very wary about giving out your email address. Only subscribe to the most reputable newsletters, avoid posting your address in newsgroups and don't send around email forwards to large numbers of people (spammers have been known to harvest the email addresses from forwards they receive). Don't post your email address on a message board or online forum, as spammers use computer "bots" or programs to harvest email addresses that are posted in most online places.
2. If you want people in a forum or message board to contact you, post your address in an obscure way so that a human could figure it out, but a program could not. For example: contact me at: chase7733(put the at symbol here)chaseandsam.com. You may want to get a little creative here, as email harvesting programs are becoming clever enough to harvest some addresses written in this matter - for instance: someguy somewhere.com might get harvested.
3. Don't reply to any spam that's sent to you - Don't try to unsubscribe, and don't send an email to the sender with "remove" in the line as this will tell the spammer that your email address is "live" and being used.
4. DON'T ever buy anything advertised by a spam email, that only encourages the problem!
5. Some spam senders use computers to randomly generate email addresses. This way, all common names in a given domain are hit with spam regularly - the way to avoid this is to use difficult to guess addresses, or email addresses with letter/number combos: e.g. Jesse5443@yourdomain.com instead of Jesse@yourdomain.com. |
posted by Chase Thompson @ 1:12 PM   |
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