Sorting Out the Junk
E-mail in a Data-Congested World
Do you dread opening your e-mail program because it is always flooded? Have you subscribed to many mailing lists, leaving you bewildered as you drown in chain letters? Are you getting e-mail with virus attachments from strangers? Have you adjusted your mailbox filter settings so high that you are no longer receiving even genuine e-mails from friends or family? Whichever of the above problems you might be facing, you can become e-mail savvy just by following a few simple rules.
Know Your Enemy
But before you learn how to protect yourself, you need to be familiar with the five kinds of junk e-mail that you might get:
SPAM: Spam mails are the Internet equivalent of telemarketing. They are not only irritating but they occupy valuable storage space especially if your service provider offers you a limited mailbox. But have you ever wondered how these strangers get hold of your e-mail address? Well, there are a number of ways. Some of them get it when you share it in online chat rooms. Others will take it from the long list of recipients that appear in chain letters. Still others would manually or automatically scan the World Wide Web for e-mail addresses written on Web pages or blogs, and your address might have appeared in one of those. Once your e-mail address has appeared publicly and made available to an open, online audience, the likelihood that it will be picked up by a spammer or scammer is very high.
SCAM: Scam e-mails can vary from being notifications for winning lottery prizes to direct attempts to have you send your credit card or bank account information. One of the more popular ones includes a plea for help to transfer large sums of money (usually millions of dollars) from one country to another, with the claim that the sender had been assured of the recipient's trustworthiness. An upsurge in e-mails containing pleas for help usually happens after mass-scale disasters like the Asian tsunami and hurricane Katrina. Some of the messages might contain links to websites with pictures and a postal address to send money to. The end goal of most scam e-mails is to steal money from you, and the scammers work hard to make you think they are genuine
.
HOAX: Hoax e-mails are usually sent to you from well-meaning friends who think the e-mail is genuine and that they are helping you by passing on the information. The messages themselves are created by pranksters who probably think it is cool to make everybody panic in the virtual world. One of the more famous hoaxes was one posing as a virus alert asking recipients to delete a particular file from the Windows folder, claiming the file to be a virus. It stirred a ruckus in 2003 when many people deleted the file from their computers after finding it right where the e-mail had said it would be.
MALICE: These are "e-rumors" or urban legends that contain misleading data about a famous personality, events, people, troops of a particular country, or a company. They typically contain information which is hard to check or verify but seems quite believable, and since they spread through family and friends, this increases the degree of its credibility. Since the descriptions are usually generic in nature, warnings that are usually carried in such e-mails seem to apply to the recipients' own town, city, or country, even though it might have originated in the other side of the world. Famous examples of such e-mails include warnings of AIDS-infected needles found stuck in movie theater seats, or the use of freakish genetically modified food by a famous food chain.
VIRUS: These small software programs typically come hiding inside attached files and start running once you try opening them. Although they currently spread mostly through such attachments, they are increasingly gaining in sophistication as virus creators try to exploit weaknesses in e-mail programs to make the viruses run automatically. Once run, viruses try to spread on their own from one machine to the next, and while in the past they used to be transferred mostly through portable storage media (like disks and CDs), they are now mainly spreading through e-mail and the Internet. While most viruses would work on their own to manipulate or destroy data on your machine, some are used by hackers to invisibly gain access to your machine and the data on it. Created by devious but clever minds, the intensity of a virus may vary from being annoying to being extremely destructive. Attachments to e-mails you do not seem to understand or expect are in many cases the bearers of viruses.
Protect Your Borders
Now that you know the different types of junk e-mails, let's go through some of the rules you should follow to protect yourself:
Rule 1: Install a good antivirus application and always keep it updated. There are several famous and reliable ones on the market. Watch out for those free antivirus packages, however, as many of them contain spyware themselves (programs that help people spy into your computer). Put your antivirus application in the auto-protect mode, so that it would catch viruses or other intrusions as you surf the Internet or check your e-mails.
Rule 2: Never give your e-mail address to anyone in an online chat room, whether stranger or friend. If you do, your e-mail address will be free for the taking by anyone who wants to enlarge their spamming list, target you with intruding viruses, or subscribe you to mailing lists you would not be interested in just for annoyance's sake. If you want to exchange your contact information with someone, do so privately and through a channel that will not be permanently posted online or be accessible to a public audience.
Rule 3: Create a separate e-mail account for e-mails you get from e-groups, online contests, discussion groups, online forums, newsletters, surveys, and online petitions. This will keep your original e-mail address more protected from being spread online. Use one of those widely available free e-mail programs for this purpose. All of these Web-based e-mail programs offer a huge inbox where you can set your e-mail filter to "High" and can report spam. These sites also incorporate good antivirus applications and catch most of the virus-loaded junk e-mails.
Rule 4: Ask your friends and family to use the Bcc (Blank Carbon Copy) field when sending e-mails to large lists of people instead of the To or Cc fields. The Bcc field will hide all addresses of recipients added to it and thus does not leave them exposed to misuse.
Rule 5: When forwarding a joke or an interesting chain letter, always forward it as "inline text" instead of attachments. This way you will be able to delete the list of previous recipients from the e-mail header and protect them from future abuse. Some e-mail programs have this option automatically set but you can also do this manually by copying and pasting the message yourself into the new e-mail you will send. Remember to use the Bcc field for your list of recipients too.
Rule 6: Always be skeptical of those e-mails you get from strangers. Spam and Scam e-mails are usually sent from addresses you do not know. E-mail programs increasingly incorporate filters to try to sift out those messages that appear to include spam or scam. Corporations are also increasingly applying the services of specialized software that do the same to all it's users' e-mails at a more sophisticated level. If you have access to either of such services, make sure you tweak the filter according to your needs. But remember, these filters are not fool proof and spammers are always figuring out ways to go under their radar, so you will have to keep updating them. In other cases, if your filter settings are too tough, you might get legitimate e-mails caught up in the filter. Check back in your junk e-mail box from time to time to see if anything you need has lost its way in there.
Rule 7: Make it a habit to check sites specialized in exposing hoax, malice, and scam e-mails before you forward messages from friends that seem too shocking or out of the mainstream. If you receive a message about someone with a high profile or some large scale event that you cannot find on mainstream media outlets, there is a chance that it might not be all very true. Some of the more famous sites to check are
Hoax Slayer and
Truth or Fiction. They specialize in investigating such claims and verifying their authenticity. Even if you put the text of the message in an online search engine, you will be able to identify how far spread the e-mail is and which sites have responded to them. If you cannot find a record of what you are looking for and you are still skeptical, you can always e-mail the specialized sites and they will investigate it for you. Besides doing it for free, they will also spread the word so that others will not fall into the same trap. You too should send back to the ones who sent you the message to inform them of its falsehood.
Rule 8: Never reply back to spammers. Some people think that if they send back an "unsubscribe" message or an angry e-mail scolding the sender out of sending again that this would make them stop. If you do, then you are actually informing the spammer that your e-mail account is valid and that spammer will keep sending you spam even more. If your junk e-mail options do not catch these messages then just delete them yourself.
Rule 9: Finally, make sure you back up valuable e-mails and files on a regular basis to avoid major losses if a virus hits or your computer breaks down.
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