help with troubleshooting spam while using internet
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decibel.places posted this at 17:18 — 15th June 2008.
They have: 668 posts
Joined: Jun 2008
Hi Dolores,
I assume you are referring to email spam in your inbox.
Be careful what sites you choose to enter your email.. read their privacy policy and/or terms to ensure they are not collecting emails for marketing purposes. They might not tell you they are collecting emails, but many sites will assure you the DO NOT.
Most email programs (Outlook, Thunderbird, Yahoo Mail, Gmail etc) have some kind of spam detection. Often you need to add spam addresses by marking a message as spam. Of course, the professional spammers constantly change their settings so this does not work so well.
Most email programs also have "filters" that scan the From or Subject for keywords and direct the matching messages to a selected folder, so you can filter messages that recur or have objectionable words in the subject.
For example, I send all messages with "xxx" in the subject directly to the Trash folder, along with some other choice keywords that show up with some frequency.
Look at the bottom of the email and see if there is an "unsubscribe" link. Most reputable marketing firms provide you a way to "opt out" of future emails. While I suspect that some of these links are used to confirm and gather emails for lists, I think they are generally genuine.
You won't see an unsubscribe link at the bottom of a 'confidential and personal' transfer of $3,500,000 from the commercial bank of ... whatever - I am astounded that marks continue to fall for these scams, if not they would not continue to be sent...
You can create a free email account at www.yahoo.com or mail.google.com or mail.msn.com (Hotmail) for your online registrations to keep spam out of your personal email. I prefer Yahoo. Or if you have broadband (cable, Verizon) they generally provide email accounts and you can also create one for registrations.
Finally, if you have a website, investigate ways to camouflage your email address on it.
If you are referring to spam from forms on your website there are various forms of Captcha - the Carnegie Mellon University ReCaptcha is popular and easy to install.
On my GeoCities site I added a JavaScript listener to ensure that the mouse is over the submit button on submission of the form - a way to ensure a human is submitting the form without Captcha - and I have reduced formerly 20+ spam submissions a day to 0