Spam is back with a vengeance

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.

Tagged as: crime, email, security, software, spam