What Is Spam?

If you spend any amount of time on the web, you will eventually start receiving spam. These messages can range anywhere from benign commercial solicitations, to annoying pharmaceutical advertisements all the way down to scams that are looking to pilfer your personal information for the purposes of identity theft. How do you protect yourself from spam?

Fighting Spam

Think of the Internet as a strange city.

While you are still getting your bearings, it makes no sense to randomly hand out your personal information — does it? Most websites are perfectly legitimate, but even so when possible it is always better to give out the bare minimum information that a site requires. Privacy policies aside, you can never tell where your data might end up. Also, be aware that during the signup process on many sites, you’ll be given an option to opt into email lists. Unless you really want your mailbox filled with advertising, take the time to uncheck these boxes.

Another option that Internet Bootcamp recommends to limit your exposure to spam is to create a second email account. Use this account only to register to websites, and save your real email address for communication with sources that you trust. That way, for a while at least, you should be able to keep your primary email box free of clutter.

More Spam Reduction Tips

“Did you ever get a joke or something sent to you that’s been forwarded about twenty times before. At the top of the email is all the email addresses of everyone who got it before. There might be hundreds of them. Guess what? That’s a spammer goldmine. Each email address represents a computer. Sure, your own computer may be secure but how about all those other ones? All it takes is one compromised computer and everyone’s email address is spammed to death. Here is my next tip; don’t save or pass on forwarded emails with multiple recipients. Especially, don’t forward it to me. I don’t care how funny, relevent, or dirty the message is. I don’t want my email address out there on 100 unknown computers.” — Muskie-Lures

“Consider ‘masking’ your e-mail address. Masking involves putting a word or phrase in your e-mail address so that it will trick a harvesting computer program, but not a person. For example, if your e-mail address is ‘johndoe@myisp.com,’ you could mask it as ‘johndoe@spamaway.myisp.com.’ Be aware that some newsgroup services or message boards won’t allow you to mask your email address and some harvesting programs may be able to pick out common masks.” — State of Michigan

“Most ISPs have an e-mail address to use when reporting spam. Often it is abuse@(host_service). Tiger Technologies’ address is abuse@tigertech.net. Sonic’s address is abuse@sonic.net. Send the entire message when you are reporting spam, not just the address.” — Computer-2tr

More Reading

Phishing
419 Scam
Identity Theft

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