Just a note

I think that there are a lot of you who really need to read my spam policy! Have a nice day!
See the Pages section for the link.

The Verdict is in on those annoying emails

If you get emails like UK Lottery or one from Microsoft or other emails referring to handling money, I just heard that they are ALL scams. Ignore them, delete them. After all, if you didn’t play, how on earth would you get an email about it anyway. I find these emails just as agonizing as spam.
I must get 2 or 3 of these buggers in a week. They only end up in the trash bin. No one should take these emails seriously. Doing so would be costly for those who do.

To find out if something you get is a scam, check out http://www.snopes.com/
for more information.

They keep coming, and I keep deleting. Some, I unsubscribe if possible. You know, don’t our
inboxes get full enough with other emails anyway?

See also Those meaningless annoying why did you get it emails

Those meaningless, annoying, why did you get it emails

If you are like me, you are getting meaningless, annoying, why did you get it emails. I am referring to those emails like you won an Internet Lottery, or some Attorney is representing someone and they are emailing you for assistance. Someone emails you with a very polite manor requesting you to handle funds of a large amount. Did you ever get any emails like these? I must get about 2 or 3 minimum a week, and all they do is end up in the trash bin.

Not only that, what in the world did you do to get any of these emails in the first place? Somehow our email addresses get on someone’s email list and the rest is history. I find this very annoying if not a waste of my time and e-space. Somehow these emails get past the spam blocker. Also, some have no message in the body, just an PDF attachment. I only ever opened one once and it was some information on Viagra. NO, I don’t need any of these products please! I just have gotten in the habit of deleting anything like this. I don’t eve bother with them. After all, opening anything like this could bring about things we don’t want.

I would have to guess that the better majority of these kind of emails are either scams or the fact that they have sent to a wrong email address. I don’t even respond to them anymore. I used to reply back “Wrong Email address” and click send.

I’ve been meaning to write about this subject for sometime now, but, have delayed until now, since I wasn’t sure what to say about it. If anyone out there is reading this post and you are one of those who send these types of emails, PLEASE! S T O P!

I just wanted to share this today, since it was kind of on my mind. Hope this post was useful.

Planet: Internet

Good, bad, ugly, unseen, are some examples of what awaits us on the Internet. I’ve been writing about spam, phishing and security issues lately, and it seems that this is a never ending subject. Everyone from a new user to someone at the top of the corporate world needs to be concerned about this subject. The Internet is like a planet, in that, you can find just about anything on it like you can anywhere on Earth. Also, from within the Internet, you can find viruses, and other malicious and non-malicious things just waiting to get you. On the other hand, there is a vast amount of good and reliable resources available on the Internet. Of course, you have your online stores such as Amazon, Barns and Noble, Ebay and so fourth. Now, being just a user of the Internet like many others, I have no idea if there is something patrolling the Internet looking for these evil items of interest? Perhaps something like and Internet patrolling software could be created, which I will call “I-Cop” could be created to cut down on these items. Now, perhaps, something like this already exists? I don’t know, but, wouldn’t it be neat if something could be out there dealing with this stuff, so we would not have to? I am not sure how something like that could be implemented. After all, we have police on Earth, why not something on patrol watching the Internet? Forgive my rambling, I am just “posting my thoughts” as in thinking out loud so to speak.

Spam Policy on my blogs

Starting today July 7th, 2007, I am strictly enforcing my spam policy that has been in effect for a while now. I have been getting a lot of spam of late and decided that I don’t have time to moderate the increased volume of spam. So, if anyone leaves a reply and the system thinks it’s spam, then it’s spam. Sorry!

SPAM – It’s effects and what to do – Part 3

Now that you have learned about some of the effects of spam, it’s time to see what can be done to deal with spam. Some of the links provided prior to this post cover some useful information in this area.

The following are steps you can take to deal with spam:

1. Make sure that your ISP’s Spam detector or Spam blocker is ON. Also, make sure that
if there are any necessary settings that go along with this, are set to your desired statuses.

2. Make sure that any “spam” or “Junk” settings are ON and set to your desired statuses when using any email browser such as Thunderbird or Netscape Inbox. Also consider reviewing any of these type of settings if you are using any web based email systems such as Yahoo.

3. Since spam can contain Trojans, you need to make sure that your firewall and anti-virus software are ON or running. Just in case any spam gets through and you don’t catch it in time and you accidentally activate something without realizing it.

4. If you receive an email and you don’t know who it is, don’t open it, delete it!

5. (if you are a business) You need to determine your policy on spam. Consider that some spam that is blocked may not be actual spam, but, what the blocker thinks is spam.

I have a spam policy for my blogs, and I admit that I have been lenient on the policy and checking it and either approving or deleting the spam that comes in. There have been a very small amount of spam that was actually worth while comments that had to be approved. This is why I haven’t enforced my spam policy to the letter. How ever, I may modify my policy a bit as time goes on.

SPAM and Phishing in todays Internet

First, in the case of Phishing, you are sent an email that looks very authentic and if you are not careful, you could get caught and end up allowing sensitive information pass right to the Phisher and then you are caught hook line and sinker. With SPAM, you are sent lots of emails or other forms of electronic messages which could bog down your system. They are both in the form of electronic messages and/or email. One can bog down your system and the other can bog down your pocket book or wallet if you are not careful. I’m currently writing a 3 part article on SPAM and with this I am going over the effects of what spam can do and how to deal with it. The first two parts are posted already. There are also some posts on Phishing. Unfortunately this SPAM doesn’t spoil and Phishers have plenty of bait to use. I’ve been seeing a lot of spam and have recently received some emails that were obvious Phishing attempts. I decided that it would be prudent to write about these issues to be able to help anyone who needs this information.

I have multiple blogs and some receive lots of spam every day. Some of the spam is close to being useful while others are not. About 99 percent of the spam received on a daily basis ends up being deleted. I’ve noticed a steady increase of spam since launching my blogs early this year. Large volumes of spam can have a bad effect on a server.

With Phishing, and while volumes of these types of email is not the issue, responding to them is. I’ve received around 3 emails this past week and they were all fraudulent emails that appeared to be from very legitimate web sites. One of the web sites, I don’t even have an account with, which made it a dead give away. I contacted both web sites and one responded right away informing me that the email was fraudulent.

Both spam and fraudulent emails from Phisher’s are security hazards and need to be treated seriously. Stay tuned for my 3rd part on SPAM – It’s effects and what to do.

Also, you can refer to the following posts:

1. SPAM – It’s effects and what to do – Part #1
2. SPAM – It’s effects and What to do – Part #2
3. What you should know about Phishing

SPAM – It’s effects and what to do – Part 2

In part 1 of this article, I used an acronym to try to describe in my view what spam was. I also provided some informative links regarding spam. In this part, I want to go into more detail on the effects of spam. Spam can effect everyone, not just business or corporate.

Here are some effects:

1. Spam Spikes: These defeat anti-spam systems that rely heavily on signatures like desktop anti-virus systems do. For smaller businesses, this can be similar to a distributed denial of service attack. Also can effect email servers.

2. Increased work: SPAM can also add to the work for those people or businesses that review what spam comes into their sites. Sometimes spam contains useful information that can get confused as spam. During such reviews, decisions are made to keep or delete selected entries. Some elect to have spam automatically blocked and deleted, thus never having it reviewed.

3. SpamZoids: This is an every day Internet User who’s PC has been infected with a Trojan that sets up an SMTP application that sends out spam. SpamZoid is a term that I came up with to describe this problem.

Here are some forms of a SpamZoid:

One form is that the user’s PC forwards spam sent by a spammer and another form is that the Trojan came preset with spam and a mailing list. Thus the PC sends out spam and the user has no idea what is going on. The user may eventually understand that the PC is becoming slower than normal. There is also a 3rd form of a SpamZoid. In this case, there is an opposite effect of sending spam out, the user’s PC automatically downloads junk files from another site on the Internet. Thus wasting disk space. I found out about this form slightly over 2 years ago when a friend of mine encountered this problem.

More to come in part 3 (of 3), or you can refer to the first post:

SPAM – It’s effects and what to do – Part 1

Medical related information submitted

I’ve been noticing an increasing amount of medical related comments or replies submitted to this blog. I’m not sure if it is meant to be spam or if it’s actually meant to be honest and legitimate information. In any case, this blog has nothing to do with medical or pharmaceutical purposes.
If this is not meant to be spam, then those submitting this information are just waisting their time. This blog is intended to be for sharing problems and solutions with all PC users. The medical/pharmaceutical information is being blocked for deletion and is never posted for user access. For more information, please refer to my spam policy. Thank you.

SPAM – It’s effects and what to do – Part 1

Serious, Painful, Aggravating Messages that you get via email, blog sites, web sites and where ever else you can get electronic messages. How’s that for an acronym? Let’s begin by talking about the first word in this acronym -

Serious: I call it serious, because, spam can be serious especially if a system gets bogged down with it, such as an attack. Those on the other side of the fence care not about those that it effects except for their own gain.

Painful: It can be painful in addition to being serious for about the same reasons and what needs to be done at times to purge it. Sometimes spam can contain Trojans or other harmful items of serious nature. I used to work for a data center, and for a time, some of the systems were not sufficiently defended against various issues. One time after an innocent email was sent, which unknowingly to all parties of concern contained a virus that crashed one of the main PCs.

Aggravating: It gets old after a while when you constantly get spam.

Messages: S.P.A.M. can come in different electronic forms. Sometimes appearing very innocent to the unsuspecting user.

I will admit that there is probably innocent forms of spam not meant to be harmful to anyone. This type would most likely fall under the “aggravating” category.

—-
Concerning this blog:

I’ve been faithfully reviewing, moderating and updating this blog each week as best as I can and there are times that I see spam come in that contains useful information that is intended to be of a good nature. The problem is that the information does not conform to the focus of this blog and ends up being deleted. This is not a medical site, but a blog for all PC users concerning with PC issues. There are times that I think some people waste a lot of time entering information in some sections of this blog. It’s a shame that it wasn’t in focus with this blog, otherwise, wow. Now, on the other hand, there has been a lot of spam that has absolutely no useful content at all. I won’t go into details, except to say that it was just not appropriate.
—-

The purpose of this post is to provide information concerning S.P.A.M.

Please see also the following links that I found on the Internet:

1. Email Spam
2. Spam in Blogs
3. Gates on the effect of spam
4. The emotional effects of spam

For a free download of spam blocking software click here. I haven’t reviewed or tested this software.

In addition to the above information, please also see my Spam Policy as it refers to my blogs.

More to come in part 2 (of 3)