In December 2003, President Bush signed the “Can Spam” bill which is the first national standards concerning bulk unsolicited commercial email. The bill, approved by the Senate by a vote of 97 to 0, banned distributors of unsolicited commercial email from utilizing fake return addresses to disguise their identity (spoofing) and the utilization of dictionaries to develop such mailers. At the same time, it banned using misleading subject lines and demands that emails incorporate an opt-out mechanism. The law also prohibits distributors from harvesting addresses off Web-Sites. Violations constitute a minor crime subject to up to 12 months in jail.
One big point that have to be discussed about this is the fact that spam is now coming from other international locations in ever greater numbers. These emails are more challenging to combat 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 end the problem.
So what do you need to do about this? Here are what you can do to guard yourself against electronic mail spam.
Do almost everything you can to avoid having your email address out on the net.
There are applications termed as “spam spiders” that browse the web for email addresses to send email to. Should you be interested, do a search on “spam spider” and you will be surprised at what you get back. Interestingly, there’s a site, WebPoison.org, which is an open source project geared to combat Internet “spambots” and “spam spiders”, by supplying them false HTML website pages, which consist of false email addresses
A number of guidance for you a) use form emails, which can hide addresses or also b) use addresses like [email protected] in place of your full address to help battle the issue. c) You will find in addition packages that encode your email, like jsGuard, which encodes your email address on website pages to ensure that spam spiders find it tough or impossible to read your email address.
Get spam blocking software. There are various products on the market for this. Anything at all you do, get the software. This will help save you time. The application is not foolproof, but they actually do help. You at all times have to do some manual set up to block specific types of email.
Use the multiple email address technique.
You will find loads of free email addresses to be to use. If you need to subscribe to newsletters, then have a “back-up” electronic mail address. It would be like giving your cell phone number to your best friends and the business number to everyone else.
Attachments from those you don’t know are BAD.
A well-known problem with spam is that they have attachments and attachments may have viruses and spyware and adware. Some Organizations always have filters that don’t let such things pass to you. Personal email is far more “open country” for spammers. General rule of thumb: if you do not know who’s mailing you something, DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT. Secondly, look for services that offer filtering. Firewall vendors offer this type of service as well.
Email services now have “bulk-mail” baskets. If what