Spam

What is Spam

As defined in the Wikipedia Spam page "Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, especially advertising, indiscriminately" The term "spam" covers many different unsolicitied communications.

You should be suspicious of e-mails, texts, or social media messages that arrive:-

1. Without a subject;
2. From a sender you do not know or recognize;
3. Offering something too good (even a $20 or $50 for a survey) to be true;
4. Without greeting you by name;
5. Having a file.zip attachment;
6. Containing a link and when you hover over it with a mouse it does not display a trustworthy webpage;
7. And ask for your personal details.

What Can You Do About Email Spam?

Given that preventing Spam is extremely difficult (it wouldn't be the major concern that it is were this not so), you can take steps to try and reduce the impact of spam to yourself. However nothing you do can stop it completely (unless you simply decide not to accept any form of electronic communication). Also note that the more effort you take to block spam, the more likely it is that you will also block a fraction of legitimate messages to yourself.

1. make use of your ISP's anti-spam measures. Different ISPs employ varying amounts of spam counter-measures, depending on their resources and philosophy on to what extent they believe in "intercepting/analyzing" their user's emails. Please note that whilst PCUG/TIP utilize some anti-spam measures, we do not employ spam filters that scan the message content, as this requires greater system and admin resources than we have available. Brief details of the measures we use are given on the TIP Wiki Spam page. If these are not sufficient for your requirements, then you need to use some of the following alternatives.
2. make use of the spam filtering capabilities of your email client. Many email clients come with spam filtering capabilities. However you need to activate and train these to make use of them. Once enabled, you need to tag messages as spam or not spam so your program learns what you regard as spam (or not). With sufficient training, this can help classify emails fairly well, as you wish. The disadvantage of this approach is that this classification is done on just one system, and doesn't help if you use several systems, and/or webmail to access your email.
3. Forward your Email to another ISP, or to a large web-email provider (eg. gmail, yahoo, hotmail) who have the resources to run more agressive and nuanced email filters, and then access and read your email from this site.

Further Information

Sites you can visit to find out more about "spam" are:-

• Wikipedia Spam page
• Anti-Spam Consumer Resources and Information
• Spamtrackers SpamWiki