Stop Email SPAM cold!

That's right complete email protection is available to you.  Well, at least that's what companies who offer Email Spam protection want you to believe.  There is some truth to it though, you can protect your Email Inbox with a high degree of certainty.  The system that offers this claimed near bulletproof inbox is called a "challenge response" system.  

The way challenge response systems work is that:

Email Spam - Challenge Response

Sounds like a nice system right? It does offer VIP level of protection.  However this email spam solution does come with a few downsides:
1. Money - You may have to pay for this service.  
- Only a few internet and email service providers offer this protection at no extra cost.  
- For example, Earthlink (link http://www.earthlink.net) uses a system they call "spamBlocker" which is in fact a "challenge response" spam filter.
2. Time - From the time the system receives an email and sends out the challenge response, the person receiving it may take hours or days to write back.
3. Setup - To get a challenge response working really well you should build an address book (whitelist) of people who never ever get filtered by the system.
- It takes time to setup you're address book with all the friends, family, newsletters, online invoices, etc that you receive, but don't want filtered.
4. False Positives - Sometimes the system will put an email from someone in your address book in your SPAM filter.  
- With some systems that user may even wrongly receive a challenge response from the system.  
- False positives don't happen very often, thus the over 90% protection rate that these systems quote.
5. Annoying - Challenge response systems can be annoying to people not on your whitelist who genuinely are trying to email you.
- Think of the scenario of an old friend that emails you out of the blue or someone from a meeting, guess what they get the challenge response.

Here is some more technical information on challenge response systems from Wikipidea.

If you currently have an email provider or internet service provider that offers this system at no extra cost, by all means take advantage of it.  When properly set up these systems offer superior protection.  There are ways for spammers to get around the systems, but the systems can reduce the amount of spam email you get in a dramatic way.

Related Topic: This site has more information on Email Marketing.

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Email SPAM - An Ounce of Prevention

It’s difficult to fight SPAM without knowing how SPAMMERS work.  The goal of a SPAMMER is to capture your email address.  They use a wide variety of ways to get that email address.  Here are some common ones:

1. Searching the Web For Your Email

- They use software to search websites for email address’.

- If your email address is on a website somewhere you can expect to get SPAM.

2. Guessing Your Email Address

-They use sophisticated programs to guess email address’ at domain names.  

-It’s possible that you could open an email account under any domain name and receive SPAM email within minutes.  

-This is especially true at the large free email providers like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail.

One they have an email address they need to test it, to see if it’s real.  The spammer didn’t know if your email address is a real address or just gibberish. Multiple techniques are used here as well to verify that you and your email address are valid. You may even recognize some of these techniques:

Fight Email Spam

1. Links

- You’ll receive an email with almost any type of text, it may even look like a real email from your bank, newsletter, your email company, a colleague, family, or friend.

What To Look Out For:
- The thing to look out for is the link in the email, be suspicious of the link. 

- Once you click it they can verify the email account exists, it belongs to a human being, and they’ll be sending SPAM to it on a regular basis.

- DO NOT CLICK THE LINK

2. Images

- You’ll receive an email with possibly no text in it or gibberish text from what appears to be some novel or news article.

- The email has an image in it.

What To Look Out For:

- Any email from someone you don’t know that contains an image.  

- This type of email will NOT show up with an attachment icon, the image is not attached to the email. Instead a different technique is used.

- You may not even see an actual image, it could be a ‘transparent’ image, but it is there.

- Once the email is opened or even previewed the SPAMMER knows the email address exists and is valid.  

- Technically speaking what happens is that the image is sitting on a web server, it’s not attached to the email like you might do when sending pictures to friends.  

- The email is coded in such a way that your email program acts like a web browser and it goes out to the web to retrieve that image.  Then you see the image in your email account.

3. Code

- You’ll receive what appears to be a blank email or one with text.

- The email in fact has hidden programming code in it that ‘wakes up’ when the email is opened or previewed.

- In most cases you won’t see the programming at all, you would need to view the source code of the email itself.

What To Look Out For:

In this case it could be any email from anyone.  A clever SPAMMER might even be using an address book they took from a Spyware infected machine.  If your email address is in the infected machine’s the SPAMMER will send an email to you.  The email you receive might look like it’s from your friend, but in fact is from the SPAMMER who is trying to confirm the email address is real.

Email Security

I’m sure you have recognized at least one of the scenarios above.  In fact almost any piece of email from anyone, even someone you trust, could in fact be from a SPAMMER and laced with tracking information or worse.

Email Security - You can do something about it:

Protect Yourself

1.      Use separate private and public email address’.  The private address is given to only those you trust.  The public one is for everyone else and should be setup with one of the free email providers like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail Email.  They have built in SPAM protection and you don’t have to download it to your computer and worry about additional issues (Spyware infection, malware, etc.).

2.      Use SPAM filters. Most good free email providers include a wide variety of protection.  PC based SPAM filters like SpamPal (http://www.spampal.org/) filter your email before you get it to block tracking code, images, blocks blacklisted known senders, and SPAM like email types.  We use it all our machines and it’s free!

3.      Use a firewall and virus protection.  If at home or at work make sure you have both.

4.      Don’t give out your private email address or post it to the web.

5.      Don’t open any piece of email from someone you don’t know. Look at the sender name and the subject line, trash it if it looks out of place.

6.      Turn off the ‘preview’ feature in programs like Outlook and Outlook Express.  From a SPAMMERS point of view this is the same as opening it since the image loads and the tracking code loads.

These tips can help clean up your inbox and save you valuable time that would have otherwise been spent going through your SPAM to find real email.

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Protect Your Email With a Free Email Account

Email is a valuable communication tool, but it can also have it's drawbacks.  Part of Email's popularity has always been it's ease of use, low cost, and speed in delivering the message.  Unfortunately it's those same factors that are enticing shady Email Spammers to reach people with their widely hated SPAM Email. In a recent study it was reported that 60 bln Emails are sent daily and 50-80% of that is all SPAM Email!  With that much SPAM out there it’s important to think about:

Email Security

Easy things to do to make sure you’re email address doesn’t get in the wrong hands.  In most cases you already have an email account and you already receive SPAM.  Here is a common scenario:

Lots o’ SPAM

I receive more SPAM than actual email.

Email Security - Protect Yourself

What to do:
Start fresh! Setup two new email accounts.

1. One email account should be a private account that only you and your closet contacts know.  Think of it as a private number, only to be given to the most trusted people. This means you won’t be using your old SPAM infested account anymore.

2. The account user name should be unique because SPAMMERS use software programs to ‘guess’ usernames.  Here’s an example, instead of Bob@yahoo.com use words that aren’t in the dictionary along with numbers t65ugb4r3@yahoo.com.  It’s not easy to remember but you won’t be getting any email to the account from someone guessing it.

3. This email address should not be used for newsletters, email bills, online signups, or anything else like that.

4. Make sure you let everyone know your old SPAM infested email accounts won’t be used anymore.  

5. Let only those you want to know what the new one is.

6. Setup an email address with a free email service provider for everything else (newsletters, email bills, online signups, etc.).  Free online email services like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail Email, Gmail all are easy to use and have built-in SPAM filters.

This tip should drastically reduce the amount of SPAM you get.  Remember, don’t share your private address with strangers.

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