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What
is Spam?
Basically,
spam is stuff that turns up in your e-mail box that you do not
want and have not asked for.
In
April this year, the Federal Government legislated to make the
production of spam e-mail within Australia illegal. However,
the volume of spam reaching most of our e-mail boxes seems to
be growing exponentially. And, of course, the Australian laws
do not have any power to curb spam from overseas.
The
Australian legislation makes the receiving of e-mail material
an “opt in” rather than an “opt out” arrangement. This means
that for you to receive e-mail marketing or other promotional
material, you are assumed to not want it unless you have specifically
agreed to receiving it. Hence the number of occasions on which
we have recently asked clients to advise us if they want to
receive e-mail communications from Tripos IT.
Some
Dos and Don’ts
1.
Most of us have fallen for the trick used by most spammers.
“Please reply with UNSUBSCRIBE on the subject line if you don’t
want to receive any further communication from us.”
Replying
cements your name into the e-mail address list from which your
item of spam originated. As soon as you reply, they know that
your address is a real, live address, and it will be sold to
the next person who is looking for an address list
Never
respond to any spam. Simply delete it.
2.
Don’t make a phone call to any number shown in a spam e-mail.
A number in such an item indicates that the sender is either
stupid, or, more likely, attempting to play a prank on someone.
Imagine getting hundreds of phone calls from around the world
to your company’s 1800 number. It would cost a fortune and waste
hours, as well as probably testing the patience of your real
clients when they cannot contact you because your phone is always
engaged.
3.
Don’t give your e-mail address out too widely. I know. The reason
most of us are on the Internet is to simplify and speed communications.
In our own case, we have e-mail addresses on our Web page because
we would like people with an interest in our services to contact
us by e-mail or telephone. This is a hard option.
This
restriction should be weighed against your commercial requirements.
4.
Don’t contact the apparent sender of the e-mail. There is every
chance that they are not the true source of the communication.
The data miners of this world provide masses of e-mail addresses
from which a spammer might choose. If one of these e-mail addresses
is on a network which is set up to allow a facility called Open
Relay, the spammer can arrange for that server to become the
sending host for a run of spam. And the apparent originator
is only guilty of not adequately securing their server. And
they may have good reason to set their server up in this way.
So,
you are open to Spam. Now what?
There
is quite a number of products you could investigate to minimise
the amount of spam you receive.
Some
spam blasters work at your Internet connection: the gateway.
Any message which comes into your workstation or server will
be checked against a list of typical offending e-mails and either
rejected or accepted. The list against which mail is checked
may be a list you create over time, or it may be a list managed
for you by the supplier of the anti-spam software, in much the
same way as virus identities are updated by the supplier of
your anti virus software.
Another
sort of “filter” will hold all you mail in a holding pen until
you either accept or deny access by review. In other words,
you look through the e-mails in the holding area and decide
which you want to allow through and which you want to disallow.
Over time this manual process of list building will preclude
most spammer’s e-mails “by example”.
Whatever
approach you wish to adopt, care must be taken to not preclude
genuine e-mails and to not include too many spam e-mails.
If
you would like more information on any area covered ion this
newsletter, please call you normal IT support person or contact
Tripos IT on the numbers shown at the top of our welcome
page.
Changes
to your subscription
Removal:
If
you would like to be removed from our mailing list, please send
an e-mail to the address below with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject
line.
Additional
subscriptions:
If
you would like our eNewsletter to be sent to others in your
enterprise, please send an e-mail to the address below with
ADDITIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS in the subject line and the recipients’
e-mail addresses contained in the body of the message.
support@tripos.com.au
Thank
you.
Stewart
Rankin Pty Ltd – ACN 007 972 901 & DL & LD Greenhough
trading as
TRIPOS IT
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