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How to deal with spam!
Saturday, October 28, 2006
I've been away on holiday for just six days and as such, didn't go near an Internet connection in that time. After getting back earlier today, sleeping off the jetlag and having a nice cup of tea (!) I have just switched on my computer.
I have several e-mail accounts for different projects and in total I received over 350 e-mails of which about 75 have NOT been deleted on first glance. That means 79% of those e-mails were spam. Argh!
On the plus side, I use a nifty PC utility called ePrompter which allows you to simultaneously track upto 16 separate e-mail accounts. Once you have told the software (which sits in your system tray) which accounts to check and how frequently to check them, it notifies you when there are new messages and how many there are. You are then able to read the e-mails within ePrompter and delete them if necessary, without ever fully downloading them onto your PC. Any original e-mails not deleted are left on your e-mail account server so when you do open your e-mail program on your PC, you will receive your e-mails as normal.
The e-mails are displayed in text format, so nothing is downloaded e.g. tracking images making your computer more secure and retaining a greater level of privacy. In addition, in my e-mail program, it often converts different character encodings (usually associated with undesirable e-mails e.g. =?shift-jis?blahblahblah which is Japanese) and I have to open the e-mail to see the content. ePrompter is much better at showing character encodings in the title of the e-mails so it makes spam filtering an even quicker process.
To go through the list of titles and delete the spam ones, just click on the inbox of the account you are interested in, and use the space bar and 'x' key to run down the list - space to skip to the next title, and 'x' to mark it for deletion. To see an e-mail just double-click it. Using this method I managed to delete a considerable portion of the rubbish in just a few minutes.
To minimise spam I do adopt a few practises; the overall aim being not to ever send a message to the spammers.
Firstly, unless it is your office policy, do not use an out-of-office autoreply - if you receive a spam e-mail and you send a reply, you are telling the spammer that your e-mail address is valid, and that is likely to vastly increase the amount of cr*p in your inbox. Your e-mail address will be added to a list and sold. If you do have to or want to use an autoreply, do read this post from Digital Inspiration for further advice.
Secondly, if you receive an e-mail that you do not fully understand, or is full of nonsense or you are in the least bit suspicious about - DO NOT reply to it. This again is asking for your e-mail address to be added to a list for spammers to sell and use.
NOTE - also be on the lookout for phishing attempts. These are e-mails purporting to be from (e.g.) eBay, PayPal and banks. They look authentic and ask you to confirm your details, state that your account has been suspended, that a new e-mail address has been added to your account or something similar. The phishers want to collect your login details so will misdirect you to a fake login page they have set up (the link in the e-mail looks authentic but the location it takes you to is not). If you are not sure about information an e-mail you have received, go to your account directly in your web browser - do not use the link in the e-mail - and see if there are any messages upon login.
Thirdly, if you can set your e-mail program to receive messages from unknown addresses in text-only format, this will increase your security and privacy. HTML e-mails can contain an invisible tracking image, so the sender can see if you have opened the e-mail. Whilst this can be used for harmless reasons, it can also be used maliciously. Using text-only e-mails from unknown sources can reduce this risk.
