Quick Tech Updates
Avoiding Spam
I am always being asked about spam. My response is to try to guard your email address as best you can. I ran across this list on epals.com the other day. It is very straight forward and similar to what I usually tell people:
1. Ensure that email addresses are not posted anywhere publicly viewable on the Internet. Using an email address on a webpage, a public bulletin board or newsgroup posting is a sure way to be picked up by spam mailers who comb online resources for more addresses.
2. Users should also be asked to avoid signing up for free offers and commercial mail distributions lists (joke-a-day mailing lists are a good example), as the main way many of these companies make a profit is by selling lists of email addresses to spammers.
3. Users should never reply to spam email, as it often simply serves to confirm to the spam mailer that the mailbox in question is a valid address.
4. Once an email address is known to spam mailers, it is essentially impossible to completely stop the flow of spam messages.
Here is the bad news. If you are concerned and reading this it is probably too late because you are on some spam lists. There are some settings in both Eudora and Webmail that allow you to do some filtering by subject line. We do not filter at the server level. Our only filtering is done through Morenet, before the mail ever gets to the server, so there is not much I can do about it except tweak the settings on my webmail filter.
