Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Security Advice To Protect Against SPAM

Spam is one of the most annoying things that you can encounter while using your email accounts. These unsolicited email messages are usually sent by dubious individuals or companies trying to sell something to you. In some cases, they can even be very dangerous since many hackers use spam messages when looking for potential victims. Spam emails are usually sent en masse to various mailing lists, news groups and individuals, with the intent of hacking into their systems. Many people may not realize it but chances are, every single person who has an email account has received at least one spam email message. While spam can be annoying or bothersome for individuals with personal email accounts, they can also hit companies and organizations and they can be used to break through their security as well.

Many spam emails messages also contain various forms of viruses, worms and other forms of malware that can harm a computer and compromise its security. This can be inconvenient for people who use computers at home, but it can have more pronounced negative effects in a company setting. This is because company computers are often connected to a network and if one terminal’s security is bypassed and it gets infected with malware, the chances of other computers in the network getting infected can go up as well.

There are many ways of controlling spam depending on how you use your emails accounts. Free email accounts like gmail and yahoo mail often have spam security filters that do an acceptable job at sorting out spam emails. Many email clients like outlook and apple mail also have built in features that can help with managing spam. However, if you need a more robust and powerful solution to controlling spam, then there are a lot of really good commercial security products available in the market today.

There are a number of different methods which can be used to block off spam; methods such as spam reporting, spam tracing, hiding your email from spammers, and spam blocking and filtering. All these methods are quite useful and will definitely lessen the amount of spam sent to your email. The following are short explanations on how these security techniques work.

Spam reporting
This can be done quite simply as most emails come with this feature automatically built in. One has to simply label the received email as spam and the email provider will automatically block it off.

Spam tracing
This is normally not necessary as there are much simpler ways to get rid of spam. This entails having to track down the sender and then reporting to your email provider.

Hiding email
The easiest way to avoid spam is to avoid posting your email around the Internet. It is not a good idea to leave behind your email in forums or leave them visible within social networking sites as spammers will gladly send emails to any address.

Blocking and filtering
Once spam is received, the email address of the sender can easily be blocked off and one would never have to worry about receiving email from them again as their email will be automatically filtered for your security.

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