Unwanted email includes messages that have malicious software attachments, are part of some kind of fraudulent scheme, or are associated with cyberbullying, online child predators, or other illegal or undesirable activities. There are many kinds of unwanted email, with most sharing one or more of the following traits:
* They make demands on your time and energy, but provides little or no benefit.
* They have unexpected and potentially harmful attachments.
* They are intended to harass, embarrass, or intimidate, the recipient.
* Chain letters, bogus offers, rumors, and other information that lacks authority, usefulness, or validity.
* They encourage visits to web sites associated with malicious software, fraudulent activity, or inappropriate content.
* They make unsolicited offers for some kind of commercial product or service.
As long as your child has an active email address, there will be someone willing to send your child email he or she does not want to read. While no technique or toll can get rid of all unwanted email, You can help your to child reduce the chance that someone sends unwanted email by taking the following steps to make his or her email address less visible online or offline:
1. Choose mailing lists carefully: Encourage your child to join only mailing lists that send out useful and worthwhile information Also, your child should only join mailing lists that have an easy procedure for removing an address.
2. Avoid having an email address published online: If your child has to put an address on a web page, use a secondary or throwaway address that can be cancelled if it starts to get too many unwanted emails.
3. Make it hard for a machine to read an email address: There are many "email harvesting" programs that automatically search for email addresses on web pages, blogs, and other locations online. These addresses are then sold in bulk so that businesses can then send unsolicited email to unwilling recipients. One way to make it harder for these automated email-gathering programs to read the email address is to add a space after and before the "@"sign in the address. A human would have the good sense to remove the blanks, but a program would not. Another way is to display the email address in a graphic rather than with text.
4. Don't volunteer to receive email: During the registration process, many online services like email accounts or social networking sites ask if you want to receive product updates, newsletters, or other information by email. If this happens, the safest option is to decline. If your child does decide to receive this kind of email, only allow it if the site makes it easy to get taken off a mailing lists.
5. Use a secondary email address for administrative purposes: Anytime you do something like register a new product or sign up for a new service, there is always the chance that your email will be misused by that company. Encourage your child to use a secondary or throwaway email address for these purposes. If that business starts to send unsolicited email and refuses to stop, then your child can simply cancel that backup email account.
6. Be very careful with online marketing offers: Online marketers frequently use contests, surveys, coupon offers, and other enticements to get users to provide their email addresses and other contact information. It is very likely that an email address will end up in one or more mailing lists and that this email address may end of receiving many unsolicited emails. If your child is going to provide an email address for any kind of online marketing effort, make sure that it is a secondary or throwaway address.
7. Remove your email address from mailing lists: Remind your child to remove her email address from any mailing list that sends mailings she no longer wants or needs.
8. Follow the rules for school or work related email addresses: If you or your child have an email address issued by a school or workplace, then that email should only be used for related activities. When schools issue email accounts to students, or businesses create accounts for workers, their rules typically prohibit use of the email for personal purposes. If an email is needed for personal use, it should be very, very easy to get an email account either from the ISP you use for accessing the Internet at home, or from the many online providers of free email accounts like Gmail and Yahoo.
9. Do not volunteer your email address: If you have an opportunity to provide an email address, but is not necessary to for someone else to have it, then don't provide it. This goes for online activities as well as for offline activities.
10. Consider using a fake email address: If someone insists on being provided with an email address, and you have no need or desire to receive emails from this person, then provide either a fake email address or one that you no longer use. Obviously, if you have a legal obligation to provide truthful information, then you should provide a real address. But for situations such as an annoying person at a party who insists on getting in touch in the future, a fake email address will be very useful.
These steps will not totally solve the unwanted email problem, but if your child were to consistently follow this tips for keeping email addresses less visible, the result will be less time spent clearing junk out of the inbox and extra time spent doing more enjoyable things online.
Additional Resources:
Spam.Abuse.net -- http://spam.abuse.net
Stop Spam Here -- http://stopspamhere.ca/
Top 10 Ways to Stop Unwanted Email -- http://www.speedbrake.com/email/nospam.htm
Reduce Risk With Internet Filtering For Business CAPTCHA Compromised - Spam Ensues What Are Spam Filters? Why You Need To Worry About Spam Are SPAM Emails Legal?
0 comments:
Post a Comment