Spam is back with a vengeance

Posted Thursday, 7 December 2006, 14:53 HST @995

This article was first posted on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=264

There’s much more spam slipping through filters and into e-mailboxes these days. The graphic from Yahoo’s article has some good basic tips.

This New York Times article has additional details.

I get a lot of unsolicited e-mail, because I have a few Internet e-mail addresses that are over 10 years old. Somedays I think every newbie spammer on the planet has my address in one of their databases. More than a few students have passed my e-mail address along to a spam list. It’s part of the teaching job.

I don’t use Outlook or Outlook Express or any mail client at all. Frankly, I think Outlook is a memory-hungry hog of a program.

Web-based email seems to help me keep the spam under control. I love the spam filters in Gmail and Yahoo.

I check links in my e-mail messages very carefully before I click on them. eBay, Google and Yahoo’s toolbars have some anti-phishing features to detect bad links.

Responding to spam is a bad idea. It does little more than tell the sender that you read their e-mail, and they’ll just resell your address to other spammers. A “live” e-mail address is worth money.

Don’t send e-mail that has been formatted with stationery or HTML code. Plain text looks boring, but HTML code is used by spammers to do all sorts of interesting things. I actually set my accounts so that they won’t display the HTML formatting at all. That’s better than blocking HTML-formatted e-mail, which I’ve seen a few servers do.

Don’t respond to chain letters or resend funny e-mail messages.

No reputable software company will send out virus warnings or software patches in an e-mail message.

Check Snopes.com, your software vendor, and other sources before you resend a warning, rumor or urban legend. You can subscribe to Snopes.com and various antivirus and software RSS feeds in Bloglines or any other RSS reader. That’s a great way to receive updated information about these messages.

If you read this far, here’s a special one-time only extra credit offer. Take a screen shot of your RSS reader, showing some if the feeds that you’ve subscribed to and e-mail it to me, and I’ll add 10 points to your final exam score.