Avoiding Spam, Scams and Computer Viruses

Written by Garth Catterall-Heart


One ofrepparttar most popular pages on about-the-web.com is about avoiding scams, hoaxes and urban legends onrepparttar 132832 Internet (http://about-the-web.com/shtml/scams.shtml). Here are a few ways to avoid some ofrepparttar 132833 perils associated with being connected torepparttar 132834 rest ofrepparttar 132835 world.

As a general rule of thumb, beware of any offer that sounds too good to be true. This applies to products being offered onrepparttar 132836 Internet and especially to any unsolicited offer or spam you receive in your email. Many of these are scams.

The term "spam", in case you don't know, refers to any unsolicited bulk email. If it's not addressed to you, or you don't recognizerepparttar 132837 sender, or you're being asked to buy something or pass along questionable information, then that's spam. My advise is to "canrepparttar 132838 spam" by immediately deleting any email you receive from anyone you don't know.

The best way to avoid spam, is to be very careful about who you give your email address to. My advise here is to set up a free email account and to give this email address to anyone you don't absolutely trust with your personal information. It almost never does any good to fight back against spam. Your best course of action is just to delete any unwanted email.

A trick that has been pretty successful for me is to set up an email rule (or filter) that automatically sends any mail not addressed to me to a special folder. Most of this is spam and can be easily disposed of.

In addition to spams and scams,repparttar 132839 other thing to watch out for onrepparttar 132840 Internet is hoaxes, urban legends and false information. There are many of these floating aroundrepparttar 132841 Internet these days. Beware of any email that asks you to send money for any cause, or to forwardrepparttar 132842 email to all your friends. Almost all of these are hoaxes. An excellent resource for information on hoaxes, urban legends and false information is http://urbanlegends.about.com/index.htm

Spam: Hiding Your Email Address

Written by Richard Lowe


In many instances you will want to put your email address on your website, even if you provide a form as a contact method. This is useful because it increasesrepparttar number of ways that someone can contact you. Why is that important? Because presumably if you have a website you are attempting to communicate withrepparttar 132830 world - and communication goes both ways. If you have a commercial site thenrepparttar 132831 answer should be obvious - someone may want to purchase something.

Another reason to put an email address directly on your web page is for people to request information via autoresponder. These allow your visitors to click a simple mailto link and get your promotional materials or articles in their email inbox.

The problem with directly including your email addresses on your page is spam harvesters. These a programs created by scum and run by ignorant or unethical fools. What they do is search throughrepparttar 132832 internet, looking at web sites and pages for email addresses to add to those million email address collections that you see advertised (mostly in spam) all overrepparttar 132833 place.

There is really no ironclad way to prevent these bottom-feeders from scanning your web site for email addresses. There are a number of techniques, however, to make it a little more difficult for them.

One of these is to code your email addresses in something called Unicode. This is a "language" for encoding special characters on web pages. All modern browsers support Unicode as it's primary intention is to allow languages all overrepparttar 132834 planet to be represented.

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