Hosting Corner

Mary C. | 12 January 2005 |

HOSTING CORNER
Aaron Agee, Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

How do I avoid unwanted e-mail?
Do you receive lots of junk e-mail messages from people you don’t know? It’s not a surprise if you do. E-mail has become very popular in the last five years, and marketers are increasingly using e-mail messages to pitch products and services. Many consumers find unsolicited e-mail (spam) annoying and time consuming.

Typically, an e-mail “spammer” buys a list of e-mail addresses from a list broker, who compiles it by "harvesting" addresses from the Internet. If your e-mail address appears in a newsgroup posting, chat room, or online services membership directory, it may find its way onto these lists. The marketer then uses bulk mail software to send hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages to addresses on a list at the click of a mouse.

How Can I Reduce the Amount of Spam that I Receive?
Try not to use your e-mail addresses in newsgroup postings, chat rooms, or online services memberships. You may want to opt out of member directories for your online services; spammers may use them to harvest addresses.

Check the privacy policy when you submit your e-mail address to a website. See if it allows the company to sell your address. You may want to opt out of this provision, if possible, or not submit your address at all to websites that won’t protect it.

Decide if you want to use alternate e-mail addresses: one for personal messages and one for newsgroups and chat rooms. You also might consider using a disposable e-mail address service that creates a separate e-mail address that forwards to your permanent account. If one of the disposable addresses begins to receive spam, you can abandon it and keep your permanent address. To find a provider, do a search on the internet for “disposable e-mail addresses”.

Will Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam Filters help with the spam problem?
Yes! Blizzard Internet provides virus-filtering software as a hosting service. It will greatly reduce the amount of unwanted junk e-mail and computer viruses received by e-mail addresses at your domain name (e.g. info@domain.com). Using the software, you can:

*Control the sensitivity of the e-mail filters to insure that they work to your advantage.
*Decide if you want to permanently block or approve a specific sender.
*Decide which messages you want delivered to your inbox. We will not "censor" your e-mail for you by deleting messages that you never knew existed, as many such programs do.

Unfortunately, spam won’t be going away any time soon. Taking some precautions, however, can help cut down on the amount of unwanted e-mails reaching your inbox.