Bothered by Spam?

For someone just trying to get on with sending and receiving a few legitimate emails, here are some tips for coping with spam.

Are you bothered by Spam? Does it fill your email In Box? It’s a big problem for everyone at the moment, with some estimates that spam contributes about 80% of all email traffic.

For someone just trying to get on with sending and receiving a few legitimate emails, here are some tips for coping with spam.

The Stop Spam website

Visit www.stopspam.net.nz. This free web resource, provided by InternetNZ, aims to help you understand and minimise the impact of spam.

It describes what spam is and how it works, offers some ideas for individuals and businesses to reduce their spam burden and provides an overview of the current legal situation. It also offers a set of golden rules to follow when dealing with spam.

Spam filters

Your ISP should be able to provide some spam filters for you. Check with their Helpdesk to find out how to turn these on.

Check your email software for its spam-fighting features. In many email programs you can turn on a spam or junk filter. Turn it on and then train it by marking spams as junk, rather than just deleting them.

In Gmail use the Report Spam button.

Never reply to spam, even to unsubscribe

Don’t email spammers to tell them to go away. Don’t use their unsubscribe links, and never, ever send them money (for products, services, or anything).

Instead use your email software’s facility to mark the email as spam or junk (so that it better trains the filters), and then just delete the spam.

If a message is particularly offensive then you can try keeping it and contacting your ISP who may ask you to send it through to them. Most ISPs though are utterly overloaded with the torrent of spam and are unlikely to be very interested in any one message.

Get rid of the ‘catchall’

If you have a domain name you may find that all wrongly addressed email is sent to a ‘catchall’ address. This is handy if people make typos when sending email, for example they send to infromation@community.net.nz by mistake (see the ‘from‘ instead of ‘form‘?), but it’s an open invitation to spammers.

It’s a common spammer technique to blast emails to invented addresses. If you leave the ‘catchall’ address open these will be redirected to you.

The good news is that if you shut down that ‘catchall’ address you can dramatically reduce the amount of spam you receive. You may miss a couple of legitimate emails, but that’s the trade-off.

Written for and reproduced from CommunityNet Aotearoa Panui, April 2007. This article may have been modified from the original.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Confused? You've found you're at KnowIT when you expected to be at TiKouka at MacTips? The blog has been moved over here and you were automatically redirected. Found something broken? Please let me know.