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Avoiding Spam

Why Is Spam A Problem ?

If you have been online for more than a day you will already know how annoying it is to check your mail and find a list of commercial messages that are quite frankly of no interest to you. Most of them are for get rich schemes and chain emails designed to make someone at the end of the Spam some easy cash. While these are certainly annoying they are not the real problem, the true abuse lies with the pornographic spams sent by the millions to un-targeted email address. The problem becomes even more serious when these messages fall into the hands of children !

Where Do They Get My Email Address:

There are various ways of collecting email addresses but none as easy as the newgroups. The newsgroups are a fountain of information and make up a very valuable part of the Internet. However, every day spammers use software to strip thousands of email addresses out of the posted articles in the newsgroups. There is a simple and very effective way to stop your address being abused:

If your real email address is joe.bloggs@aol.com, simply set your newsgroup client/software up so that 'FROM' and 'REPLY TO' fields are something like this joe.bloggs@NOSPAM.aol.com. This works so well because spammers don't check each address and will simply send their mail to a large list of harvested addresses. However, if they attempt to send a spam to your altered email address it will simply bounce. You will never see their message and they will have to pay to download the delivery failure report. Obviously by altering your email address in this way makes it unusable to genuine people on line, so simply add a signature to your newsgroup posts explaining that the 'NOSPAM' part must be removed.

By adopting this simple method you will slash the amount of spam you receive by a massive amount. Other tips include using one of the free email forwarding accounts, some of which come with free spam protection. (Eg. www.bigfoot.com, and www.hotmail.com)

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AntiSpam Software

There are now many spam protection programs available, they work in two formats. Some are designed to generate multiple complaints and other delete spam before it even gets to you

We are currently in the process of reviewing the numerous programs available and giving them a grade of the five star rating system below:

* = Very Poor / Don't Bother
* * = Poor / Only Consider If It's Free
* * * = Average Features / Good Performance - Worth A Look
* * * * = Good All Round Performance / Protection
* * * * * = Excellent All Round Performance / Protection

Spam Exterminator (dead URL)		* * * * *
Spam Hater		* *
Spam Killer		* * * *
Antispam.ORG AEP (dead URL)		* * *
Mail Jail		* * *

These ratings are purely based on a combination of our team of reviews and public opinion - we strongly advise you to decide which is best for yourself.

If you would prefer to have your spam protection looked after by someone else, you might want to consider spam protected domain hosting. There are plenty providers around, naturally we can only recommend our sponsor = http://www.deltavex.com