Handling Spam: Responding

Written by Richard Lowe


Most spam messages will include a link atrepparttar bottom which states something like "to remove yourself fromrepparttar 132833 list click here ...". Onrepparttar 132834 surface this seems innocent enough, but if you do respond you are potentially increasingrepparttar 132835 amount of spam that you receive by many times.

Wait a minute. You mean you ask to be removed and instead not only are you not removed but you will get more spam than ever? How can that be so? To understand why you must first understand how spamming works. You see, spammers operate by getting zillions and zillions of email addresses however they can.

Sometimes they purchase CD collections of "15 million clean email addresses" or "5 million email addresses" for some small amount of money. I've seen these collections as cheap as $9.95 (one wonders how clean these collections are).

Another common tactic is to use spiders to scan thousands of web pages for email addresses. These addresses are then added to a database which is then sold or used.

And sometimesrepparttar 132836 spammers just pick a domain and send their spam to a variety of possible email addresses at that domain. They just pick a domain and use a dictionary of names and send every one of those names torepparttar 132837 domain. Those that generate a bounced (error) message are deleted fromrepparttar 132838 list.

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

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