Austin Lane

If you have been paying attention to the latest technology news, you would have seen that there has been a large outbreak of a new worm. It sends itself out and disguises itself as a warning about a possible virus or worm outbreak. How does this apply to stopping SPAM? Continue reading to find out.SPAM, and I am not referring to the processed meat that is produced by Hormel, is also known as Unsolicited Commercial Email or UCE. Often times, this UCE requests you to buy the popular enhancement drugs or offers some kind of debt services.

From Wikipedia: “According to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft founder Bill Gates receives four million e-mails per year, most of them being spam.^[13] Ironically, most offered the world’s wealthiest person opportunities for debt refinancing or get rich quick schemes.”

Hopefully, most of you do not receive a lot of UCE or SPAM emails, but here is a look at the numbers and what is considered SPAM, again from Wikipedia:

• 1978 - An e-mail spam is sent to 600 addresses.^[8]
• 1994 - First large-scale spam sent to 6000 newsgroups, reaching millions of people.^[9][10]
• 2005 - (June) 30 billion per day^[7]
• 2006 - (June) 55 billion per day^[7]
• 2006 - (December) 85 billion per day
• 2007 - (February) 90 billion per day

What can you do to avoid this barrage of SPAM? Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Avoid posting your email address on a public web page such as EBay, or even on your own personal site. If you must post it, use obfuscation techniques to hide the email address. You can even do this by posting your email address as an image.
• Avoid giving out your email address in a chat-room.
• Avoid using easy-to-guess email addresses like john.smith@example.com. If your name is John Smith, add a middle name, an initial, or numbers to the email address to make guessing your email address more difficult.
• Avoid clicking on an email’s unsubscribe link. While this may be required by law in some places, it also alerts spammers that your email address is valid and can bring more SPAM your way.
• Avoid forwarding chain letters, petitions, virus warnings, or even those Nigerian Get Rich Quick schemes. These could be part of a spammer’s tactics to harvest more email addresses.

These tips and others can be found at Consumer Reports’ website, http://www.consumerreports.com.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 8:23 am and is filed under Email, Jeff's Tech Tip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.