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Useful hints

Protect your e-mail address

The most important task to avoid getting spam is protecting your e-mail address. Do not publish your address, subscribe for doubtful newsletters, do not be fooled by different proposals promising favourable offers to you. If, despite of this you still got spam, your e-mail address got to the spammers somehow. Usually an automatic program is scanning different web sites for valid e-mail addresses. Then these collected address are sold to spammers or exchanged between each other.
Another method is - also with help of automatic programs - that the addresses are gathered from mailing lists or are asked for registration on a webpage. These all will get into the spammers' lists or will be sold.

How to recognize spam?

The unsolicited mail is usually a direct mail promoting very cheap and mostly bad quality products or services. Generally they are sent by unknown persons or organizations and agitate for buying of that.

Often, there is a little text at the end of spam informing the user that "this mail is not a periodical mail, you will not get it more". This text can be a proof that the user's name and address is on the address lists of spammers and he/she can get several mails next time and the sender would like the user not to inquire about the mail.

The REMOVE method. "If you don't want to get more mails like this, then send a mail to the following address including the REMOVE word in the subject field!" This is for registering the user's data, with the help of this reply they will be informed whether the address is valid and in use.

Some spammers use the following trick: they are writing in the name of existing (or non existing) organizations and send their mails referring to law paragraphs, thinking the recipients don't know those and perhaps will not discover the ramp. Actually there is no law supporting spammers or spam and all the providers forbid delivery of spams.

What to do?

Never answer the spam! Do not use the unsubscribe function even if the mail includes the commands of unsubscribe method. It is used to check if the address is valid and in use.

You should remove spam mails from your computer as soon as possible because they use resources (waste space on the winchester) and some of that can contain infected attachment.

Call your provider for legal arrangement.

Prevention

The following suggestions can reduce the risk of the user to be targeted by spammers:

  • Use spam filter solutions to block spam mails that spares the users the exhausting and time-consuming work of sorting out spam mails from the normal mails.

    • Most important thing is that system administrators have to prevent spammers to be able to exploit their systems. Who fails to build a secure system takes a great risk of unauthorized utilizing the system resources. It can result that the systems' IP will got into black lists so many of the other computers are not going to receive mails sent by them.

    Besides using security softwares, the following simple methods should also be respected:

  • Use more than one e-mail address. Your main address should be revealed only for reliable persons (family, friends, clients, known persons). In any other cases use your another, temporary e-mail address as it can be deleted easily should it become the target of the spammers.

    • Do not use too short e-mail addresses! Spammers often generate random addresses (xy@, aa@, ham@, etc.) to have a real and used ones by chance.
    Do not make your e-mail address public! Many of the spammers buy address-lists from agencies who get them from web pages, forums, and other public pages.
    Read regulations! Whenever you are asked for entering your personal data, read the aim of the data collection.
    Hide your e-mail address! Everybody who has own web pages should think over the displaying of his/her e-mail address on them. Some applications are able to gather them searching for e-mail addresses on the pages. The simplest way to avoid it the revoking of the MailTo links from the pages. But it is not the best solution, you can use script programs (like JavaScript) to solve this problem. With the help of a little program you can display your address without the risk of being stolen so it will be unrecognizable for automatic scanner programs. These script programs are interpreted by most of the browsers but it is possible that an older browser will not be able to use them.
    Use the BCC field, too! If there are several recipients to whom you want to send mail then you should use the BCC (blind copy) field too, because many addresses placed in the TO field can be very conspicuous and useful in spammers view.