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Tips in Avoiding Spam and Spim

November 22, 2008

Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send — most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.Spim is the unsolicited commercial messages sent via an instant messaging

  • Do not reply

Never, ever reply a spam mail, even if it is the dream product you ever wished for.  By replying to a spam confirms you read it, and your address goes on the spammer’s list for the entire lifetime of your email.

  • Say No to Beacons

Set your email to not to show images, this way you can prevent Web bugs commonly known as beacons to tell the spammer you have viewed the message, thus confirming you address again. Beacons are usually a small pictures as small as 1×1 pixel.

  • Don’t Attract Spiders

A web crawler (also known as a web spider, web robot, or—especially in the FOAF community—web scutter) is a program or automated script that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other less frequently used names for web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms.

Spiders or a web crawler is a is a program or automated script that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner.  So, if you post your email online, write out “name at domain dot com”or tm.selbor[@]gmail[dot]com.  By doing this the spider cannot identify it as an email address thus would ignore it.   Anyone who does not have the enough common sense to translate that to name@domain.com is not worthy to send you a message. 

  • Do the Filtering

Use email with a spam filter.  Almost all of the common email software has a built-in spam filter, make use of it.  Thunderbird, Yahoomail, Outlook 2003 and 2007 have their own spam filter.  Gmail’s has almost flawless spam filter.  Security suites commonly include spam filters in their package. 

  • Dummy It Up

It maybe quite tedious and your friend may get annoyed, but the more complicated your e-mail address the harder it is for the spammers to guess and to crack your code.  Let say for example tmselbor@yahoo.com in comparison to tms3lb0r@yahoo.com.

  • Avoid Spim

Spim is the younger brother of Spam in instant message. The Spam in instant messages is called Spim.  You can easily avoid it by using murky username (such as tms31b012).  Most importantly, DO NOT list your handle in the IM or Skype provider’s public directory. 

  • Avoid Spim Again

Some products will fight spim, but only if it is with the original software clients.  Web-based IM’s such as Yahoo! and Google instant messenger are not protected yet.

Have a safe computing!

Posted by extrabytes at 10:55 am | permalink

Previous Comments

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Posted by Popcorn at November 24, 2008, 12:21 pm

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