Archive for the ‘Spam’ Category

How to Reduce Spam in Your Inbox and Enhance Your Email Security

Spam is the internet’s equivalent of junk mail. Spam is defined as an e-mail message sent to people without their consent or permission. Addresses of recipients are often harvested from Usenet postings or web pages, obtained from databases, or simply guessed by using common names and domains.

Spam is sent to promote practically any product or service ranging from “Adult” products to logo design for websites. It is also used by hackers to spread viruses or links to dangerous websites used to gather your personal information like credit card details or passwords for sites like Ebay or PayPal. To the average user these messages appear genuine. Even the link has a genuine looking domain name. This technique is known as “Phishing.”
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Strategies To Fight Email Spam

If you are a business owner and you rely on email, spam is going to be a major concern.  How you address it can make a big difference in employee efficiency.  Email spam has been a nuisance and has gotten even worse over the last several years.  Email spam slows down server performance and can eat away at storage.  Cleaning all those bad messages out of your inbox is time consuming.  The easiest way for viruses to spread is via email.

Having a strategy to deal with email spam and viruses threats is essential for any business to survive and be productive.  You can limit the negative impact to your business by having policies and guidelines in place.

Tips to avoid getting email spam:
<ul>
<li>If you have a company web site, use a contact form that the web site visitor
can fill out. Some spam mers use robots that crawl web pages looking for
email addresses. Your web site designer should be able to help you with this. </li>
<li>When signing up for forums, products and services use a free email or throwaway
account like hotmail or Yahoo mail. </li>
<li>When signing up for offers be careful what boxes you check although technically
not spam you may get a lot of email offers you do not want. </li>
<li>Never reply to an email spam message, this just lets them know that your
account is active. </li>
<li>You may want to use a throwaway email address if you post on newsgroups
or forums. </li>
</ul>These measures may help to reduce spam, but if you have an old email address you may want to change your email address or deploy a spam filter system.  There are several choices for anti spam systems you could buy software that runs locally on your PC to filter the spam, but this can be expensive, does not prevent virus infection, and is not a good choice in a networked environment.  Managing individual machine spam software is inefficient.

If you have limited technical resources you can outsource you email spam filtering to a hosted anti spam and virus solution provider.  Spam filter service providers colocate their spam and virus filters in data centers with redundant power and network connections.  You will need to change your mail exchanger on your dns servers to point to the service providers spam filters. Your service provider will then scrub your email for spam and viruses.  They then forward your email to your mail server minus the spam and viruses.  This gives you a few extra layers of protection.  In the event of a network outage or server downtime your email is held and is delivered when the network or your server is available minus the virus and spam.  Spam filter services also scan for viruses; this adds another layer of defense to the virus software already running on your network.

If you have an organization with more than one hundred email boxes investing in your own spam filter appliance is the most cost effective solution if you have the technical expertise to manage the system.  A spam appliance sits in front of your email server and blocks spam and viruses.  The price of the spam appliance will depend upon your number of users, amount of mail and storage requirements.

Fighting spam is no longer be a losing battle if you have a good strategy to deal with the threat.

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Get Rid Of Spam

Every day, both dmoestic and corporate users of the internet receive considerable amounts of spam e-mail. They are not only annoying, but sometimes you can miss an important e-mail or newsletter simply because you lose it among the great number of e-mails that flood out your Inbox. Often you’ll find that important people neglect to read your e-mail, because busy people like them hardly have the time and patience to browse through the huge quantities of spam mail they receive.

One solution to this problem is a filter or a free spam blocker. Many companies have designed filters for their customers. Many e-mail servers, especially the renowned ones that have a reputation to protect, have their own free spam blocker. There are several types of programs that can help you stop spam, including:

- the ones that are offered when you create a new e-mail address. Every company that provides e-mail service has a spam filter, including those that offer free accounts like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and so forth.
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Computers and Consumers – Understanding & Avoid Identity Theft

Computers and Consumers – Understanding & Avoid Identity Theft

The Internet has given over a billion people, worldwide, a way to instantly find information. The number of threats to a consumer’s security increases as the consumer connects with more computers, companies, and people online. The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”), the nation’s consumer protection agency, says that all Internet users should understand the importance of online security and should take measures to protect themselves.

Why the Need for Security & How to Protect Yourself

The Computer: Part of a computers sophistication lies in its ability to connect with other computers over the Internet in order to bring you information. When it is connected with other computers, it opens itself up for the transmission of information, which can create vulnerability for the computer.  Hackers can connect to the computer, scan it for open ports, and gain access to unauthorized information about the computer user.
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Antispam. Aren’t We All! Don’t You Just Hate It?

Antispam. Aren’t we all! Don’t you just hate it? You’ve got enough to do without having to sift through a bunch of worthless, or worse yet, offensive junk e-mails in your Inbox.

So what can be done about it? What antispam procedures and software really work?

Spam filtering software is the first stop in your antispam campaign, but in some ways it’s the easiest to subvert.

What this antispam tool does is tell your e-mail system to look for designated clue words – sex, nude, porn, for example – and to eliminate the messages that contain these clue words. Of course, there are easy ways to get around these antispam tactics. Did you ever see a message that comes through with the word sex spelled s*e*x? Well, that asterisk method has circumvented your spam filter – or the spam filter of your Internet and e-mail provider.
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