Posted by ted on 14. November 2005 13:44
Part three of the series I'm posting regarding how spammers work and how to stop spam from showing up in your mailbox This was clipped from the excellent Fixing Email site, which everyone should have bookmarked in their browser of choice. (Speaking of browsers, Opera is now free for download and use if you're so inclined...:
1. Run an anti-spam filter
First and most important: use a good anti-spam filter or service. This will prevent you seeing the vast majority of spam. Lanlogic uses Postini and it's even free for our Shared Exchange 2003 customers!
Today's state of the art filters will remove at least 95% of spam. If you receive 100 spam messages per day, this would cut the daily spam in your inbox to a much more manageable five or fewer.
The best spam filters have vanishingly low "false positive" rates—i.e. they hardly ever accidentally delete legitimate mail. What's that? You don't want a spam filter to delete any non-spam mail? Consider this: if we just delete spam manually with the delete button, we're going to accidentally delete some good mail ourselves. Studies have shown that the best filters actually do a better job than people!
Spam filters can be part of the service from your email provider or internet service provider. If yours doesn't include a good filter, ask them why not (and consider switching to one that does!) We've had good experience with the filters built into Google's Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.
Don't be tempted to use spam filtering software that sends "challenge" replies to people who email you. It's a dangerous idea and we've never seen one that works as advertised.
2. Use anti-virus
A lot of spammers are using viruses to do the spamming for them. They're silently misusing the PCs of people like us, in order to amplify their sending capability.
Don't let them steal your PC for spamming. Install anti-virus, keep it updated, and use it!
Know your way around a computer? Have friends, neighbors, and family members who have PCs but aren't technically adept? Why not offer to check their PCs over for them?
3. Report spam
If you don’t know how to report spam just forward the spam email to Fixing Email! They will route this "forensic data" to the appropriate parties. Please include all email headers. Forward phishing and other fraud to fraud@fixingemail.org and other spam to spam@fixingemail.org.
4. Don't buy from spammers
Not too much else to say about this really. If we stop buying things from them, they'll eventually stop email us!
Clipped from the excellent Fixing Email site, which everyone should have bookmarked in their browser of choice. (Speaking of browsers, Opera is now free for download and use if you're so inclined...