Good news!
Several UK ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have at last done the decent
thing and are filtering out most spam and viruses. The Post Office, BT Open
World, BT.Yahoo, Orange, and Eclipse have good spam and virus filters. The
Orange filter is a little more difficult to set. The filter on OneTel is in
my opinion a waste of time. With some ISPs, you need to access your ISP's
website and log into your account to be able to set up the spam filter.
To reveal the source of a suspect email without opening it. Right click the email, then click Properties, then click the Details tab. Look at the item after the word From. A phishing email will not be from the organisation pretending to be the sender. For instance if the email appeared to sent by the Inland Revenue (which never sends emails), looking at the properties, you might see that after the From word is an email address which has no connection with the Inland Revenue.
If your ISP is not filtering
out spam, the best solution is to change to one that does. When you have
changed, send an email with carbon copies to everyone in your address book to
tell them your new mail address. Remember to delete your old ISP.
AOL also has a spam and virus filter but I avoid this quasi ISP like the
plague because of the lengthy obstacle course required to get to your
emails or to load a website. Also it monopolises so many bits of your computer.
Stopping spam. One way of stopping the avalanche of Spam is to change your email address by changing your ISP (Internet Service Provider). This is easy using dial-up Pay-as-You-Go, but can be difficult if you are on a monthly contract or on broadband. After changing your ISP and resetting your email account to match, you need to send a round-robin email to all the contacts in your address book to advise them about your new email address.
The best way is as follows: Add your own email address into the Address Book, then delete any redundant addresses in the Address Book (click them and press the Delete key). Click Create New Mail, then click the tiny book with the word 'To' next to it. In the list of addresses click your own address and click the other 'To' button to pop your own address into the first window. Then click the first address in the list, hold down the Ctrl key and tap the letter 'A' key. The whole list will be selected.
Then, to omit the ones that you wish to exclude, hold down the Ctrl key and click the ones to be excluded. Now click the button labelled Bcc (Blind copy). All the selected recipients will pour into the Bcc window. Click OK. Type the Subject and the email message in the usual way and Send the message to your Outbox. The Bcc addresses will not be visible to the recipients and so you will not be broadcasting everyone's email address.
When doing this, the best plan is to send not more than 10 at a time, otherwise your email may rejected as spamming.
Emails offering pharmaceuticals are scams. The medicines are nearly always fakes and vary in quality from useless to very dangerous.
Emails offering cheap software. The cheap software is usually pirated (illegal copies) and can contain viruses.
Additional protection: My ISP has an excellent spam filter, but I also have a free program called SpamAware which I use to deal with the occasional bit of spam which slips through the ISP's filter. It is not very effective but it is satisfying to be able to banish spam to a black list.
If you fail to update your anti-virus program, clicking a spam link or attachment could launch a virus which will wreck your computer and disable your anti-virus program.
