Spam

An electronic message is "spam" IF: (1) the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (2) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent; AND (3) the transmission and reception of the message appears to the recipient to give a disproportionate benefit to the sender. (from http://mail-abuse.org/standard.html).

For many people the amount of spam they get can overwhelm there inbox and make getting their real work done a challenge.

A couple of things to know;

1. If you click the “remove me from future email” links, many times they actually confirm that the email address that you are at is live and it goes into the SEND MORE SPAM list. There are not many laws protecting you at this point at a national and international level from spam so many times spammers pretend to allow you to “opt-out” in order to confirm your identities and a valid email address.
2. If you enter your email address into anything online from a children’s site to a reunion site be very careful. No one is giving away those services for free and the way many of these companies make money is to resell your private information to anyone who will buy it.
3. If you have to enter an email address online as part of the access to a service, create one at yahoo or hotmail or with the extra home accounts you get with comcast, etc. and just let that one become your junk email receiver.

OK, so you’ve been run over by spam despite your best efforts, how do you control it. There are two choices.

1. Delete your email address and create a new one
2. Purchase or use some software that does some level of automatic filtering for you.

Assuming that you don’t want to take choice #1, what are the possible software packages out there that can enable you to take choice #2? There are two types below, ones that check your email before you do and removes the spam before you see it and integrated packages that filter the spam into a separate folder within your current email software.

• Outlook 2003 filters your email after receiving it. The latest version of Outlook, version 2003 has a pretty good filter in it. I receive a lot of spam each day on one of several accounts and it lowers the amount that comes into my inbox by 90%. It takes a little bit of training for the first few weeks because it will misidentify some of your good email as spam, but after that it will make your life much easier.
• Coffee Cup Spam Blocker works the other way by filtering the email in your POP account before you get to it to remove spam. This one has a lot of proponents that swear by it.
• If you use Yahoo to check your email, you can turn on their integrated spam checker to get rid of your junk mail. It does a good job, like Outlook of just filtering junk into a separate folder.
• McAfee SpamKiller is an offering from a respected Virus software dealer and it integrates into their other software quite well. This one, like Coffee Cup, checks your email before you do and removes the spam in advance. If you are already a McAfee user, I would check this one out.
• SpamArrest is another option that stands between you and your email creating a barrier for spam. You need to do a bit of work to tune it upfront, but after that it works great.

Viruses

In a previous article I spoke about the major virus checking software on the market such as McAfee (www.mcafee.com) and Norton AntiVirus (www.symantec.com), but I wanted to talk a little bit about the internet and about how viruses work to help you with prevention as well as to give you a few suggestions in case you got caught by one of these viruses.

The Internet is more akin to a seedy part of major city with a local library and some great restaurants than a spotless interior of a Borders with a few very upscale cafes. The axiom to use is “buyer beware”; a small amount of caution is justified. Most viruses spread themselves these days by tricking you into doing something like opening a file attachment or clicking on a link. If you are not sure about a particular email and want to see if it is a known scam, go to Hoaxbusters (http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/HBHoaxIndex.html) or SARC (http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html) before opening any attachments or clicking any links.

If somehow, you still ended up with a virus on your machine, take the following steps to clean it. These steps may not be able to clean your computer 100%, but they are the best start.

• go get Stinger (http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/) . This program is specifically built to remove viruses from an infected system. Run the program after downloading to clean most viruses from your system. In general, don’t keep this program around, you can throw it away after using it. They create a new version every few days and you need to download the latest version every time you want to use it.
• Go get Ad Aware (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/) from Lavasoft or BPS Spyware Remover from (http://www.bulletproofsoft.com) . Run them to remove any adware that also got on your system.

In extreme cases, you may need to reinstall the operating system, but before taking this step because it may result in data loss, please contact a computer professional to take a look in case they can fix your system.

For more info on Viruses in general, please go to the US Government CERT site to read about them;

• http://www.us-cert.gov/other_sources/viruses.html