News, tips and updates from the GetSafeOnline.org team
According to Postini, an anti-spam company, 94 percent of all email on the internet is spam (hat tip: New York Times).
Since a large proportion of spam emails also contain viruses, it’s obvious that spam protection is also virus protection.
For more information, read GetSafeOnline’s guide to protecting yourself from spam.
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The guide doesn’t mention whitelisting – filtering known email addresses into a high-priority inbox – which is a key tactic keeping email useful despite spam.
I feel that the guide should probably also mention that it’s better for UK people to use UK-hosted (or at least EU-hosted) email because they’re more easily reachable under our laws. Also, the large webmail services like hotmail are targets for spam-harvesters (I know people who have opened a hotmail account, not published the address anywhere, yet still started getting spam).
Finally, Yahoo!s anti-spam tactics are harmful to other mailservers, as I’ve mentioned on our website in the past.
Ironically, i reached this page from msn.com which really has no efficient means to stop spamming. To the statistics, I will add one more obeservation. Almost all the spam letters at my msn address are about viagra. and gmail is the single biggest source of spamming, thanks to the spamming epidemics kickstarted by google’s group mailing through ‘orkut’.