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Spam Fighting Tips
If you’re spending more and more time deleting annoying e-mails from strangers offering dubious products, a few simple actions can help reduce your exposure to spam.
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If you have an e-mail address then the chances are pretty good that you’re receiving your fair share of spam. But while people wail on about the insidious spam threat, a little bit of education is just like Vegemite – it goes a long way.
From my own perspective I really don’t care how much spam I receive. In well over 90 per cent of cases I don’t even see it thanks to Microsoft Office 2003’s new anti-spam features.
NEW! Junk E-mail Filter – Outlook 2003’s new Junk E-mail Filter helps prevent much of the unwanted e-mail that you receive every day. It uses state-of-the-art technology developed by Microsoft Research to evaluate whether a message should be treated as junk e-mail based on several factors, such as the time it was sent and the content of the message.
Any message that is caught by the filter is moved to your Junk E-mail folder, where it can be retrieved or reviewed at a later time. You can add e-mail addresses to your Safe Senders List to ensure that messages from these senders will never be treated as junk e-mail and block messages from certain e-mail addresses or domain names by adding the sender to your Blocked Senders List.
Also, by understanding some of the spam basics, following some straightforward practices and employing a readily available counter measure, my exposure to spam is on the decline.
An insider’s view
Ron Franczyk, President of US-based Giant Company Software, Inc., is a company that is making quite a name for itself with its focus on developing highly effective anti-spam software technologies. He says, “The full solution to eradicating spam is to reduce the response rate to spam mailings to a point where it is unprofitable.”
How to combat spam
1. Never respond to a spam e-mail. All you’re doing is confirming the validity of your e-mail address and thereby helping spammers further refine the accuracy and currency of their mailing lists.
2. Rather than opening any spam message you receive, delete them based on their subject line content. There are cases of spam e-mails containing code that will automatically send a confirmation back to the spammer.
3. Don’t even consider purchasing anything via an obviously spam e-mail. It’s very inexpensive for spammers to send out hundreds of thousands of e-mails. It takes only one recipient to make a purchase, and the initial cost of sending the spam is well and truly recouped.
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