What is SPAM? It’s simple, really. Spam is ANY email that is not from someone you know or not from some company or website that you do business with and you have requested that they send you information. Basically – SPAM is any unwanted and unsolicited email. Personally, I use Gmail. I love it now that I am used to it. It has incredible spam filtering. Only about two or three spams sneak through per day. Gmail automatically sent over 24,000 emails to my Spam folder, all in the last 30 days. Well, ok, I have many email addresses that all forward to my main Gmail account and then Gmail does the filtering for me. Sweet!
Spam Blockers and Filters
So, like Gmail, your email service provider is the first line of defense against spam, and the easiest anti-spam tool to implement. Spam is filtered out by the email server without ever being delivered to your inbox. It’s like filling out a form at the Post Office saying no thanks, don’t deliver any junk mail to my address.
Unlike the Post Office, which makes money by delivering junk mail, email providers are very happy to enable anti-spam tools because they don’t want to waste their resources delivering junk mail to you. So anti-spam filtering is usually enabled by default on all email accounts you set up. But not always. Some email providers charge a small fee to enable anti-spam tools. They figure a spam-free inbox is worth some money to you.
What’s in YOUR Spam Folder?
If you have a Spam, Bulk or Junk folder that contains junk mail messages, that’s a sign that your email provider is doing spam filtering. If not, check with your provider to see what options they offer for spam blocking.
It’s a good idea to check the Spam/Junk/Bulk folder periodically to ensure that no mail you really want is getting shuffled off to that antispam pit. If someone says, “Did you get my email?” and you didn’t, check the junk mail/Spam folder to see if it’s there and add that sender to your address book or whitelist. Most email systems that do spam filtering will consider a message to be legitimate if the sender is in your address book.
“False positives” can be a problem with any anti-spam tool. A false positive is when an email is labeled spam when it really isn’t. You can minimize false positives by “whitelisting” the email addresses of people from whom you want to receive mail. Whitelisting tells your anti-spam tools that this address - or even the entire domain from which desired mail originates - is legitimate and should not be blocked.
Other Anti-Spam Tools
If you have anti-spam tools enabled on your email account but you still get too much spam, or if your email provider doesn’t offer any anti-spam tools, consider switching email providers. Google’s Gmail, as I mentioned, has one of the best anti-spam tools available. It automatically traps most spam and lets the legitimate email through.
Most email programs that manage mail on your computer have anti-spam tools built into them, too. This is your second line of defense. Desktop email programs like Outlook, Eudora, and Thunderbird allow you to create filters that can block email from specific addresses, or block messages that contain certain keywords. Most web-based email providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail have filters as well.
For most people, two sets of anti-spam tools are quite enough. A small percentage of spam mail may still slip through to your inbox, but it’s a rare annoyance and not a constant tidal wave of spam.
There are commercial anti-spam tools, such as Spam Bully, and SpamAssassin that can be installed at the server level to block spam. It’s a little geeky, but highly configurable and very effective. Contact your ISP about these tools.
If you want some background info on Spam, and other tips on dealing with unwanted email, check out Randy Cassingham’s Spam Primer (http://www.spamprimer.com/). It’ll tell you how spammers get your e-mail address, why complaining about junk mail is pointless, and how to keep your inbox safe from scammers. It’s a great article that is filled with all the info you need to stay informed about this time wasting practice.
Personally, I’d like to see ISPs charge a very small fee to send your emails. Say 1/10 of a cent (US). This means that if YOU send 1000 emails in a month your ISP will charge you US$1. BUT, if a Spammer sends 10,000,000 emails per month their ISP will charge them US$10,000!!! Maybe then they’d stop because they couldn’t recover their costs.
Special note: PLEASE start calling this year “twenty ten” and not “two thousand ten”. It’s a bad habit left over from what we called 2000-2009. But we don’t want to keep up this ‘two thousand’ thing. Ok? So HAPPY Twenty Ten!
Have a question or problem? Write me at BaliPCAdvisor@Gmail.com. I’ll try and answer as soon as I can.
Bali PC Advisor and other Bali Advertiser article Archives now ONLINE: http://www.baliadvertiser.biz/
If you are tired of trying to type the links you see in the printed articles you go to the Archive and cut-paste them
