Eccountable
Ecco News 4: Other ways to fight spam
Every now and then, I receive a message from a friend that is the equivalent of a chain letter. It usually comes in the guise of something that sounds innocuous like a personality test from Dr. Phil, or requesting that you add your name to an e-mail petition to stop a Pending Draft Legislation and pass it to 10 friends.
First thing you need to realize is that even if this e-mail comes from a family member, you have no way of knowing that it actually came from them. e-mail is notorious for being an unsecured medium of communication. Anyone out there can intercept and create messages that appear to come from or go to people you know. For every message you receive, you should handle it as though it is suspect information.
1. Investigate
I urge you, before replying to these messages, do a Google search on some of the text in the letter. Chances are you will find a site like Snopes.com ( http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/inboxer.asp) which is full of Urban Legends and can help you stop this from being passed further. Just pretend you are a journalist and you are looking for a second source of information to validate the claim. It does not take long to figure it out, and it could save you from appearing foolish.
2. Protect your friends (and clients)
If you cannot find anything wrong with the letter, please consider using the BCC field. A family member of once sent out a chain letter to me and 9 of her friends. It turns out that one of the other recipients (someone I did not know) had a virus which took my e-mail address off that message and the virus started spamming me from a school in South Carolina. If you send the mail to yourself, and put the names of the recipients in the BCC (like I do with this newsletter), then you are protecting your friends by not sharing their e-mail address unnecessarily. To use it in Outlook, start by
A. Create the e-mail (New Mail Message)
B. Click on the CC button and you will have your address book
C. There will be a BCC button that will allow you to add recipients to your message so that recipients will never see each other.
D. Or call us and we will customize your Outlook to have the BCC field on it permanently.
3. Lower your profile
If you preview mail in HTML or if you are using Outlook, turn off your Preview Pane (under the View menu). Spammers are running a business, and if they send a message that does not reach you, they are wasting their time and hopefully will give up. If you have the Preview Pane open, each time you see the nicely formatted graphics appear in that screen, your PC may actually get the graphics from the spammers web server (just like your web browser does), and that signals to the spammer that you are a live recipient. You can also disable HTML mail entirely and work in plain text, but sometimes I like the HTML mail from some vendors so I use the AutoPreview feature in Outlook (also under the View menu) will let you see the first 100 words of plain text so you can quickly decide if you want to chuck it.
4. Open a second e-mail account
I created one called junk@eccountable.com and it tosses out e-mail after 48 hours. I can use this for making postings on web sites or other public places where I don't want to give out my real address, but I still have access to it in case I need to reset my password. It is easy to get a free account or have your mail administrator create one for you. There are options within Outlook that will automate picking up the junk mail, holding it in a folder, and deleting it periodically if you don't like using a web mail account.
In closing
I apologize if I sound like a commercial for Outlook. I know that a lot of people use it as do I. There are plenty of very good e-mail clients out there such as the free Mozilla Thunderbird product (http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/) that has some integrated spam filtering features, or Eudora. Please feel free to share these tips with your friends….and don't forget to use BCC!