Remote Support
Tech Tip: SPAM
This weeks Tech Tips covers the ever popular topic of spam. I am not talking about everybody's favorite canned meat product, but rather referring to those annoying unsolicited emails that flood our inboxes. According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.com (which you should check out if you are not already familiar with this site), spamming is the use of any electronic communications medium to send unsolicited messages in bulk. In other words, spam is all that unwanted and sometimes inappropriate email that bogs up your inbox and wastes your time.
Besides being extremely annoying, spam is also a problem because virtually all the cost of those annoying email advertisements is passed on to the those who receive them. Many people argue that spam is most like a junk fax in nature, rather than regular junk mail. The reason being is that there is no postage required to send emails. The recipient of spam is left with the cost of drive space to host the email accounts that become cluttered with unsolicited advertisements. In addition to this is the cost of the Internet service, and often that of third party applications used to filter spam. And most importantly is the cost of your time lost trying to filter out the bad so you can get to the email that matters.
Just for fun here is a little trivia about the name spam. Do you know why we call these unsolicited and mostly unwanted emails spam? Of course you know the name comes from the meat product, or at least I think spam is actual meat. But the reason we use that name comes from a Monty Python sketch about SPAM. Basically a man and woman go to have breakfast at a restaurant and she finds that almost everything on the menu includes some, and in some cases only, SPAM. Of course she complains that she does not like or want any SPAM, but her complaints are to no avail. If you want to read the transcript of the sketch you can do so by clicking here.
But now for what you really wanted, how to fight spam. While there are no true solutions yet to completely eliminate spam, you can take measures to drastically reduce what you have to sort through in your inbox. Here are a few tips on how to cut down on spam, as well as how to filter it out.
1. The first tip is do not display your email address in public, whenever possible. Don't post your email address on discussion boards, or websites. Many spammers have software that scans the Internet for email addresses and if it finds yours posted, you are bound to get more junk email.
2. Have a second email address that you can use when you have to register on a website. Many websites offer services that require a valid email address so you can setup a user account. Sign up for a free email account at Yahoo! or Hotmail so that you can use it for those registrations. This will allow you to sign for those services but will keep your business email from getting more spam.
3. Don't download and install free programs unless you know exactly what you are getting. Spyware is completely other topic that I will cover soon, but suffice it to say that when you download that cool screensaver to spice up your work computer, or that cool casino game for use when you have a spare second, you may be downloading more than you want. You know those long end user license agreements you skip over when you install software.....well, they usually tell you that they are installing this and that in addition to what you really want, and they tell you that they will be "providing" you will ads (pop-ups) to help you find all those products you didn't know you needed. These spyware and adware programs are intrusive, damaging, and can also return your email address to a server and thus send you more spam.
4. Never click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of a junk email, ever! Think about it this way, did you really subscribe to receive all this email about prescription drugs? Of course you didn't, so why would you need to unsubscribe. These are just attempts to find actual email addresses and when you click on unsubscribe, the sender knows they have an actual person on the other end of that email address and now you will probably get more junk email. So just delete the messages and don't unsubscribe.
5. Use a third party email filter program. Like I said, no matter how careful you are, you are still bound to get some spam. In order to fight it, try one of the spam filtering products that will scan incoming mail and dump junk mail into a junk mail folder. None of these products are perfect, but many of them do a good job. They will reduce the amount of junk mail that ends up in your inbox, usually to a much more manageable portion. But don't forget to check that junk mail folder periodically because sometimes good email gets sent there. You can usually train these programs a bit to do a better job by adding contacts to a safe senders list, and by blocking other senders. Some of the better spam filtering programs are Cloudmark Desktop, Norton AntiSpam, and McAfee SpamKiller.
6. If at all possible, use the latest version of Microsoft Outlook for your email. There are a lot of email programs out there, but Microsoft has done a great job integrating junk mail filtering in Outlook 2003. I have used this version for my personal email for over a year now and it does as good a job as any third party software filter I have used, and it comes with Outlook so you don't need any additional software.
The best advice I can give anyone is just to be carefull with what you do with your email address and even more careful what you install on your computer. If you follow these few guidelines you will be able to significantly cut down the amount of junk mail you have to deal with and make reading email a more pleasant experience.