|
|
Surfing
the Internet Online Course |
|
|
Surfing
the Internet Online Course |
Top things people use the Internet for:
Email precautions
Be careful who you give your e-mail address to. You want to limit the amount of commercial entities who use your email address so that you do not get on their mailing list.
This is an article on Unsolicited Bulk E-mail, SPAM. Although, Spamâ is a trademark for the ham based luncheon meat product made by Hormel, it appears that the name has stuck to Unsolicited Bulk E-mail as well.
We have all received e-mails with some outrageous subject lines like "Amazing Discovery", "Who’s making money on the Internet" or something like it to get our attention. There are companies that sell e-mail addresses once you give them permission to use your e-mail address- and some that you do not give permission to. To get on a spam list, all you have to do is give out your e-mail address to a company or a site and you never know where it is going to go. To get around this problem, I use two e-mail addresses- one as a decoy and one for places that I know will not get me listed on Bulk E-mail Listing. Actually, I use 4 e mails- one for business, one for personal, and one for potential SPAM and one for internet access anywhere.
I have received as much as fifty or so of these e-mails just in one day. It becomes very difficult to find all of the real e-mail that is addressed to me from all of the SPAM.
Often, the E-mail comes with a claim that if you reply to the e-mail with "Remove" in the subject line that you will simply be removed from the mailing list. Actually, this false claim is often used to put you on another list of valid e-mail addresses. Since you responded to the e-mail, there is a live body attached to the address. You may not be interested in the most recent e-mailing, but soon you will be tempted with another bargain or deal.
So you ask what can I do? You can try filtering out the probable SPAM from your e-mail. With most decent e-mail packages, you can filter your e-mail against rules that look at headers and/or the body of the e-mail. You can setup your e-mail program to automatically reply to or discard e-mail that matches certain patterns. There are entire lists of e-mail addresses known to send Unsolicited Bulk E-mail. Also, there are lists of keywords that may be offensive to you or your children. The source for these is simply too large to post here. Simply search the Web for SPAM or Unsolicited Bulk E-mail.
You can also complain about it to their Internet Service Provider- MCN or Triangle Telephone. The difficulty lies in that many of the Unsolicited Bulk E-mails come with forged return e-mail addresses. It is the same as putting someone else’s return address on junk mail. There are currently no laws against this practice.
However, with a little training, you can read the full header of the e-mail and then send back a complaint to postmaster@<domain> or abuse@<domain> where <domain> is the proper domain of the source of the e-mail. In this letter, you need to state that you do not wish to receive further Unsolicited Bulk E-mail from this account. Include a copy of the e-mail, including full headers, in the complaint. Sometimes, if you are very lucky you will get back an e-mail stating that the account was canceled for violation of their acceptable use policy.
So where do these folks get your e-mail address to begin with? Often, you have simply given these folks your e-mail address. While surfing the Web, there may be a page that asked you for your e-mail address. Unless there is a statement that says that they will not sell your address to anyone else, often your e-mail address will be sold to companies that trade e-mail lists. Another source of e-mail addresses is from Usenet Posts and IRC chat. There are companies sell software that harvests e-mail addresses from these sources. The best practice with these is to use a fake e-mail address or one that contains a dummy phrase like "nospam" or "remove" that will cause the bulk e-mails to be misrouted before they arrive in your in tray. But a competent human being will know to remove that part of the e-mail address before e-mailing you.
