Fighting email Spam and the general safety of you Personal computer and software program

In December 2003, President Bush signed the "Can Spam" bill which is the first national standards concerning bulk unsolicited commercial e-mail. The bill, approved by the Senate by a vote of 97 to 0, banned distributors of unsolicited commercial email from making use of fake return addresses to disguise their identity (spoofing) as well as the use of dictionaries to generate these kinds of mailers. Also, it prohibits the use of misleading subject lines and demands that emails contain an opt-out mechanism. The legislation also banned senders from harvesting addresses off Web-Sites. Violations constitute a misdemeanor crime subject to approximately one year in jail.

One key issue that ought to be discussed about this is the fact that spam is now coming from other countries in ever greater numbers. These emails are harder to combat mainly because they come from outside our country's laws and regulations. Because the web opens borders and thinks globally, these laws are fine and good, but do not avert the problem.

So what do you do about this? Right here are what you can do to guard yourself from email spam.

Do everything you can to stop having your email address out on the internet.

There are applications generally known as "spam spiders" that search the net for electronic mail addresses to send email to. For anyone who is interested, do a search on "spam spider" and you'll be stunned at what you receive back. Interestingly, there's a site, WebPoison.org, which is an open source project geared to fight Internet "spambots" and "spam spiders", by providing them false HTML website pages, which include bogus email addresses

A few guidelines for you a) use form e-mails, which can hide addresses or also b) use addresses like info@company.com instead of your full address to help battle the problem. c) There are also programs that encode your e-mail, like jsGuard, which encodes your electronic mail address on website pages to ensure that spam spiders find it hard or impossible to read your electronic mail address.

Get spam blocking application. There are a lot of software programs on the market for this. Anything at all you do, obtain the software. This can help save you time. The software is not foolproof, but they quite do help. You usually have to do some manual set up to prevent specific types of e-mail.

Use the multiple mail address plan.

You can find a great number of free e mail addresses to be to use. If it is advisable to subscribe to newsletters, then use a "back-up" email address. It would be like giving your cell phone number to your best friends and the business number to all people else.

Attachments from persons you don't know are BAD.

A well-known problem with spam is that they've attachments and attachments might have viruses and spyware and adware. Some Enterprises often have filters that don't permit such things pass to you. Personal email is far more "open country" for spamers. General rule of thumb: if you do not know who is mailing you something, DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT. Secondly, look for services that offer filtering. Firewall vendors offer this sort of service as well.

Email services now have "bulk-mail" baskets. If what you use presently does not support this, think of moving to a new vender.

The authur is a software user, seller and reviewer with many years of affiliate marketing experience.