Most people I meet ask me questions about spam. I wish I had answers, but the bottom line is it stinks for everybody. Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have tried to address the problem by adding spam filters, but many of them block e-mail you want along with the e-mail you don't. Filtering is an imprecise science and trying to automate it at the server level hasn't worked well because people have different tastes.
To me, it makes sense to filter spam in your personal e-mail program. I get a lot of e-mail from people I don't know, so I can't filter out entire domains like Yahoo or Hotmail (much as I might like to sometimes).
Outlook, Eudora and even my older e-mail program have filtering. For example, like most of you, I have received endless offers regarding real estate. I set up a filter that dumps any e-mail that has the word "mortgage" in the subject line. If your spam is as disgusting as mine, you can probably think of a few other body parts and drugs you could filter on as well.
As soon as I added a few choice words to my filter, I noticed a decrease in the spam. You can tell a filter to place the spam in a special folder or just nuke it outright. My e-mail software has a "discard" feature, which means it deletes the message on the server without downloading it to my computer. In other words, I never see it at all!
And while we're on the subject of horrid spam, I should also mention scam spam as well. Lately a new type of scam has been going around. You are told that you need to update your financial or account information at a large site like PayPal or eBay. The e-mail asks you to go to a site and enter personal information. The return address looks like it is from the correct domain, so you might be tempted. However, the address has been forged and the site is bogus.
Two big clues give away this type of scam. One is that both PayPal and eBay have warnings telling you that they will NEVER e-mail you and for your personal information. The second giveaway is that when you enter payment information, in addition to recognizing the URL itself, you always should see a URL that begins https:// (instead of http://) and/or a little lock icon in your browser. This means the site is secure. Do not EVER enter financial information at a non-secure site.
When in doubt, call the (real) company. It's all too easy to forge a return address in an e-mail. Case in point: the other day, I got an e-mail from support@microsoft.com. Of course, it wasn't really from Microsoft and contained a virus that Norton AntiVirus hurriedly quarantined for me.
The bottom line is be careful out there. |
