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Fighting the War against Spam

Spam, spam…everywhere…how to prevent them? Let us first see how common spam is. Scott McAdams of OMA Public Affairs and Communications Department (www.oma.org) has done a research and found out that almost half of the e-mails that a person receive is spam. What are spam e-mails? Unsolicited or junk e-mails are termed as spam. Now-a-days, most of the computers viruses are spread through these spam e-mails. Due to this fact, many people have lost confidence in the efficiency of e-mail transmissions.

In December 2003, President George Bush signed a bill called “Can Spam” and this is the first ever national standards related to unsolicited or junk or spam e-mail messages. Do you know how much vote did this bill got in the Senate? You would really be amazed. Yes, 97 to 0. This bill does the following:

a) Forbids the use of spoofing by thee unsolicited e-mail senders
b) Prohibits the use of dictionaries to generate mailers
c) Bans the use of subject line that are misleading
d) Gathering or harvesting addresses from websites are banned

If any of the above rules are violated, the person can be subjected up to one year in jail.

Spam doesn’t come from just one country. With the advent of the internet, borders have shrunk and therefore, you might get spam from any country. Due to this fact, even though there are laws to prevent spam, you cannot do much about it. Laws of one country holds good only to that particular country.

So, there are no ways by which spam can be prevented? Nah…don’t loose hope. Follow these five golden rules and get rid of spam:

Rule 1: Try to avoid giving your e-mail address on the internet unnecessarily

Have you heard of “spam spiders?” They are products, which performs a search over the internet to locate e-mail addresses. Once they get this information, spam e-mails are sent to these e-mail ids. If you do not believe in what I am saying, you yourself do a search on “spam spider” and find out the truth all by yourself. As an interesting fact, there is a particular website called WebPoison.org and this site is an open source project. What this does is that they create bogus HTML pages and these pages contain bogus e-mail ids. This is done to fool the “spam spiders.”

Try these suggestions to help prevent spam:

a) You can make use of form e-mails as they hide the e-mail addresses
b) Rather than using full address, you can try using hr@company.com
c) You can encode your e-mail addresses using programs like jsGuard.

Rule 2: Usage of software that blocks spam

You can download spam blocking software from websites like www.cloudmark.com or www.mailwasher.net. You can even purchase a professional version of this software. Irrespective of whether you download or purchase spam blocking software, it is always better to use one such software. They will definitely help you in saving time against spam. There is a manual setup that needs to be done in this software to prevent spam e-mails from reaching your inbox.

Rule 3: Have multiple e-mail addresses

Creating an e-mail address is now very easy and most of the company’s provide free e-mail addresses. For example, hotmail, Gmail, yahoo. Say, you visit a website of your interest and would wish to subscribe for their newsletters. Then give the free e-mail address that you have created for these purposes instead of giving your official or personal id.

Rule 4: Do not open attachments sent by people whom you do not know

In general, computer viruses are spread using e-mail attachments. If you are working in a corporate, you definitely won’t get such spam e-mails as they have filters. However, for your personal e-mails, it is always advisable not to open the e-mail attachments sent by persons whom you do not know. You may also look at the option of some filtering services or can even set firewalls.

Rule 5: Usage of bulk mail option

Almost all of the e-mail services have bulk-mail baskets. Say for example, you receive an e-mail from someone whom you are not aware of and you do not want this to happen again. Simply put these e-mail addresses to your bulk-mail basket. By doing so, you will never get these e-mails in your inbox. They will directly be redirected to your bulk mail and these get deleted all by themselves over a period of 30 days in general.

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