Spam – It’s Killing Me!

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Posted on 16 Sep 03

You and all of your staff are probably suffering the extra burden of spam. It kills productivity and can, potentially; unleash a virus into your system. A recent article in Consumer Reports detailed the ways to block spam and mistakes to avoid. I have summarized their recommendations as follows:

7 WAYS TO BLOCK SPAM

1. Don’t buy anything promoted in a spam. Even If the offer isn’t a scam, you are helping to finance spam.

2. If your e-mail program has a "preview pane, disable it to prevent the spam from reporting to its sender that you’ve received it.

3. Use one e-mail address for family and friends, another for every-one else. Or pick up a free one from Hotmail, Yahoo!, or a disposable forwarding-address service like www.SpamMotel.com. When an address attracts too much spam, abandon it for a new one.

4. Use a provider that filters e-mail, such as AOL, Earthlink, or MSN. If you get lots of spam, your ISP may not be filtering effectively. Find out its filtering features and compare them with competitors’

5. Report spam to your ISP. To help the FTC control spam, forward it to uce@ftc.gov. (‘uce" stands for unsolicited commercial e-mail).

6. If you receive a spam that promotes a brand, complain to the company behind the brand by postal mail, which makes more of a statement than e-mail.

7. If your e-mail program offers "rules" or filters," use one to spot messages whose header contains one or more of these terms: html, text/html, multipart/alternative, or multipart/mixed. This can catch most spams, but may also catch most of the legitimate e-mails that are formatted to look like a Web page.

6 MISTAKES TO AVOID

1. Posting your email address on a public Web page, such as e-Bay. If you must post it, you can thwart spammers’ harvesting software by using janedoe at isp.com," not janedoe@isp.com. Or display your address as a graphic image, not text.

2. Using your regular e-mail address in a chat room. Instead, use a different screen name. If it attracts too much spam, discard it

3. Using an easy-to-guess e-mail address like ‘Jimsmith©isp.com." Instead, choose a harder-to-guess one with embedded digits, such as ‘Jim8mith2@isp.com.

4. Clicking on an e-mail’s ‘unsubscribe" link. That informs the sender you’re there. Don’t do it unless you trust the sender.

5. Disclosing your address to a site without checking its privacy policy. And don’t forget to uncheck ‘check boxes" that grant the site or its partners permission to send you anything nonessential.

6. Forwarding chain letters, petitions, or virus warnings. All could be a spammer’s ploy to collect addresses.

The three top email spam blockers are:

State Labs – "SAProxy" – http://www.bloomba.com This service can be downloaded for FREE, and there is no annual fee

Mailshell – "SpamCatcher Universal" – http://www.mailshell.com Cost = $20.00 and there is an annual fee of $14

Blue Squirrel – "Spam Sleuth" – http://www.bluesquirrel.com Cost = $30.00 and there is an annual fee of $10

Jack Fries is the president of Fries & Fries Consulting and can be reached by:
phone (859)694-1580 o fax 1-800-887-5874 o e-mail dfries@jackfries.com
Visit http://www.jackfries.com to learn details about this year’s upcoming Insurance Ski School in Colorado,<