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— | faq:preventspam [2008/02/08 19:49] (current) – created - external edit 127.0.0.1 | ||
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+ | ====== What can I do to prevent being spammed? ====== | ||
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+ | Filters are something of a reactionary approach to spam. There are actually many things you can do to prevent being spammed in the first place. While they probably won't rid you of spam completely, they can help. Here is a list: | ||
+ | * **Never buy anything from a spam offer!**. | ||
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+ | * Only give out your email to friends and trusted web sites. Most web sites will have a detailed privacy statement that tells you how they will use your contact information. | ||
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+ | * Do not post your personal email address across web pages, forums, newsgroups, or chat systems. Many spammers have developed tools that automatically scrounge the Internet to harvest email addresses from these sources to add to their mailing list. Instead, get a free email address from a service like Yahoo or HotMail that you can give out to people that are likely to send you junkmail. You can easily log into that account a few times a month to see if anyone has sent you anything worth reading, and dump the rest of it. If you must use your real email address, you can try to mask it in such a way that it is still readable to a person, but not as easily to a harvesting application. For example, your email address is // | ||
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+ | * Additionally, | ||
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+ | * Do not reply to spam messages. Most of the time the message headers (the routing information) have been faked, so your email won't get to them anyway. However, on the off occasion when the headers aren't forged, it tells the spammer that you are reading your email, which may generate more spam. Also, only ever attempt to unsubscribe from lists of legitimate organizations (they too usually have detailed privacy statements). | ||
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+ | * If you are in a corporate environment that has group email list addresses (say for departments), | ||
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+ | * Use the new [[Glossary: | ||
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+ | * There are other things that can give away information about you. For instance, your ISP may be running a daemon called //Ident//, commonly used for IRC chat systems, that can be used to guess your email address for spam harvesting. | ||
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+ | * If you use an online service that offers a member directory, opt out of it if possible. | ||
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+ | * Your ISP may have a policy where they collect spam to try to go after the originator of the messages. Check with them on their policies, as they may be able to assist you. Depending on where you live, there might also be laws that can help you. For instance, if the spam involves fraudulent or deception practices, you can forward it to // | ||
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+ | * If you have the time and the knowledge to decipher email headers, you might try to find out what server was used to send the message and who is hosting the spamvertized website. It is often quite effective to politely complain to those people as many ISPs have a no-spam policy and are often even likely to shut down offending websites or close spammy email accounts. | ||
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+ | * If you have your own domain name don't enable the "catch all" mode where anything sent to your domain will be forwarded to you. Spammers use lists of names to try and randomly guess addresses, accepting anything at your domain name will mean you will get tens of the same message sent to bob@yourdomain, | ||
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