Spam...What can you do about it?

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. Whilst the most recognised form  of spam is thought of as e-mail spam, many other forms of Spamming exist. Below we have listed a few tips to lessen the amount of spam that you receive.

  • Do not participate in chain e-mails. Chain e-mails encourage you to forward it on to a certain amount of people in your own address book and then send it back to the person that sent it to you. This is a way of gathering e-mail address’s for more spam!

  • Never click on a link in any spam e-mail, this only confirms that your e-mail account is active and you will generally receive more spam.

  • Scan your PC regularly with up to date anti virus software and anti spying software, these can be downloaded for free on our Tools page

  • Fight back!

Be pro-activel, arm yourself with some software like the one below and send the spam back!



  The European Union's Internal Market Commission estimated in 2001 that "junk e-mail" cost Internet users €10 billion per year worldwide

With MaillWasher you can easily create filters which sort your genuine e-mail from all the junk, whilst it is still on the mail server rather than after you have already downloaded it into your e-mail program. MailWasher talks  to an number of servers to determine if any of the messages come from a known source of spam and will notify you accordingly. Reporting spam is a breeze plus you get the satisfaction of knowing that all spam will be sent back to its source. If more more people returned spam to its source maybe the additional costs of running a spamming organisation ie, extra bandwidth etc then we would all see a reduction in the amount of spam that we recieve.

Without using MailWasher it would be difficult for the average PC user to reporting spam manually and be truly pro-active in the fight against keeping your mail boxes free. It is time consuming and you need to know how to trace the computer that the spam actually came from and then report the abuse to the spammer’s internet service provider. To ease this process there is a free service that you can subscribe to which will report the spam e-mail automatically for you. We strongly recommend that you check it out. Go to Spamcop now!

Some facts about spam taken from Wikipedia

  • 1978 - An e-mail spam is sent to 600 addresses.
  • 1994 - First large-scale spam sent to 6000 newsgroups, reaching millions of people.
  • 2005 - (June) 30 billion per day
  • 2006 - (June) 55 billion per day
  • 2006 - (December) 85 billion per day
  • 2007 - (February) 90 billion per day

Spam can be used to spread computer viruses, trojan horses or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft, or worse (eg. advance fee fraud). Some spam attempts to capitalise on human greed whilst other attempts to use the victims inexperience with computer technology to trick them (eg. Phishing). 

If you suspect that your computer is infected and would like us to remove it for you, Contact us

Read our other top anti-spam tips here



 
 

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