ILuvJohn

There are a lot of people out there, just like me, that want to offer the world a great website or useful information. And we struggle sometimes to see even an ounce of traffic come through. It is hard to get traffic to a website except for maybe one or 2 a day.

There is a down fall though, there are a lot a lot of people out there that either like to see people’s computer become infected with Viruses (A Virus effects the way the computer works, or deletes files) or Trojans ( A Trojan allows the attacker to have access to your files, to read them, delete them, replace them, etc) in order just to say that they did it. Maybe they started with making a website and didn’t get any traffic, so they turned to this….who knows.

There are also even others who care about nothing more than to send you junk mail. By junk mail, I mean that it is COMPLETELY pointless - either they are asking you if you want something like Viagra, or they are just trying to sell you something.

There are ways we can help stop people from getting our email addresses. I’m going to share with you a few tips that will help everyone fight spam.

#1) A lot of the time the emails that are collected from the internet. I have even done this myself at times….though it is at least somewhat ineffective as most email addresses printed online are to ‘example@domain.com’ and ’support@someusienss.com’. If you put your email address online, do so in a fashion that is not in the email format, for example:

john {at} iluvjohn {dot} com

This technique, while still providing people with your email address, will cut down on all of the automated email gathering programs out there.

#2) This example most often happens with chain mail. Sometimes we send out an email to 10 or more of our closest friends, or family. If you place the all of the email addresses in the To field, or CC field (CC stands for Carbon Copy) then everyone you emailed will be able to see who else you sent the email to. When we forward email and put our contacts in the To field, everyone we sent the email to now has an organize list of everyone that you sent to.

What happens with chain mail is that everyone starts forwarding emails to their entire contact lists, and after just a few people have done this, you have a list of a few undred email addresses that are willing to go to any website you point them to.

There are ways for people to send an email to you from any email address. The email doesn’t actually come from anyone else’s account, it just says it does.

How can we forward email’s saftely then? Use the BCC Field! BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. Using this field will send to all the contacts you specify, but will not expose any of the email address! This is the most effective way to stop getting these funny little viruses, or spam messages.

#3) Large email sites such as yahoo, hotmail, msn or gmail are the biggest targets for spam email. It is not just because they are big, it is because they are an easy target! You can type just about anything and put @gmail.com after it, and it is more than likely an email address. This can’t really be stopped, except by the companies themselves. If they have developed a system that checks from te same email going to too many of the same people, the email’s are automatically put into the spam folder. I personally have noticed more of a problem wit this happening on yahoo than any where else though. Gmail I still get spam, but not as much and it is usually all in the spam folder.

Some people can run programs called a bot. A bot is basically just a program that automates something. In some chat rooms, such as the yahoo chat rooms, people run bots all day long…there are hundreds of them. These bots have the ability to record every person that goes into a chat room. They can then send spam email to these users later. It is wise to have 2 accounts on sites like that, one for chat, and one for personal chatting. Directly Instant Messaging someone you know will not get you spammed, but even logging into the chat rooms on an account potentially leaves it open.

#4) A lot of Social Networks such as MySpace can lead to spam problems if you aren’t careful. There are 2 ways of getting spam through sites like these, but both ways require you to actively pass your email address around. One way is simple: Myspace, for instance, has a bulletin board system. People pass around “chain mail” through these systems. Some of them ask you to put your email address on it. This is a no brainer. It takes one person to use these email’s in the wrong way.

The second way is called phishing. Phishing is usually used to gain access to your myspace account, email account, etc. It is done by recreating the user login page of a website. The attacker sends out message or bulletins asking for people to follow a link. Usually they talk about girls, or something silly like that. It isn’t always as obvious though, so watch out! A user of the website reads a message or a bulletin and comes to this fake page that asks that asks the user to log in again. The user fills out their username (usually just your email address) and password and clicks send. Their information is saved to a file and then they are redirected back to their social networking site, or another page, etc. The attacker can then just run a program that sends out mass emails to all of the contacts.

I hope you found this informative and educating. Please leave questions and comments below!