Another category of hoaxes involves virus warnings. If you receive information that indicates you can get a computer virus from doing anything except opening an email attachment or running an application, then this is probably false information.

Most computer viruses are spread by users opening email attachments that contain virus. NEVER OPEN AN EMAIL ATTACHMENT THAT YOU ARE NOT EXPECTING. Even if you know sender, make sure attachment is legitimate before opening it. It is much safer to delete any questionable attachments and ask sender to resend them than to assume that sender intended to send that email.

Your best defenses against computer viruses are: 1) caution in downloading programs from questionable sources, 2) regularly scanning your drive with virus protection software, and 3) backing up all your important data to a different drive or media (floppy, Zip or CD-ROM) as soon as possible. By doing all of these, if your system does get infected, you can restore it with a minimum of hassle.

Always check out any offer or information you receive before sending any money or forwarding information to someone else. That way you can rest easy knowing you aren't getting scammed or passing along an urban legend.

For example, following email address:

webmaster@internet-tips.net

will be shown in Unicode as:

webmaster @internet -tips.net

As you can see from table below, using Unicode characters is simple. Just substitute Unicode sequence in table for corresponding character. Then use all of those sequences wherever you want to put that email address.

@ @ E E M M U U c c k k s s . . F F N N V V d d l l t t - - G G O O W W e e m m u u _ _ H H P P X X f f n n v v A A I I Q Q Y Y g g o o w w B B J J R R Z Z h h p p x x C C K K S S a a i i q q y y D D L L T T b b j j r r z z

I suppose it is inevitable that scum spammers will eventually make their spam robots smart enough to understand these codes. Until then, however, it is a reasonably effective technique for reducing spam in your inbox.