Facts About SPAM

SPAM is unsolicited bulk email from any source.

SPAM is big business, and spammers often work with lists of email addresses numbering in the millions. If only one person in 500,000 falls victim to whatever scam they are promoting, they will make a huge profit! These people invest large amounts of effort and money to continually expand their lists!

So how does YOUR email address end up on one of these lists? In most cases you can thank your friends for the honour! You send them an email, and your email address is recorded on their computer. A tiny piece of malicious software on their computer sends your address, along with every other address they have, to someone who assembles the lists. Viruses and spyware are the number one reason you are receiving SPAM in your private mailbox!

If you publish your email address on a web site, it will likely be picked up by a data mining robot. This is a small program which crawls through web pages, recording every email address it finds. If you subscribe to a bulletin board or mailing list which publishes member profiles, make sure that your email address is not included in that profile. This is the number two source of email addresses!

Most SPAM will include an "unsubscribe" line at the bottom, requireing you to click on a link, or to reply with some text in the subject line. DO NOT DO THIS. This merely confirms that your email address is active, and that the email was read by a human. Your email address just became valuable to the spammer.

How do you protect yourself?

• Use a good anti-virus program, and keep it up to date. We recommend Avast! Available from ALWIL Software .
  
• Use a good anti-spyware program. We recommend Ad-Aware SE, available from Lavasoft.
  
• If you do not know the sender, do NOT open the email. Delete it.
  
• Protect your personal email address by using an email filtering/forwarding service like legacymail.ca! (Yes, this is shameless marketing, but this is what we do, and we are very good at it!)

SPAM is an escalating problem on the internet. Take the time to read what we can do for you, and contact us if you have any questions.