If you will notice, I titled this blog "How To Reduce Spam and Viruses", not "How To Eliminate Spam and Viruses". The only way to eliminate spam is to (get this)...never use email again. That's not an option for any of us, so our best bet is to reduce it as much as possible. Most viruses are spread through spam. So, by reducing spam, we reduce our chance of being infected. The easiest way to not become infected (and a technique I read all over) is to simply not open an email from someone we don't know. But that is simply not feasible, and I'll give you an example why.
A few years back, I was working for a large corporation in New York City. I received an email from the company President with the subject "I Love You". Now, this man was a character, and it was just like him to send an email like that, so I opened it thinking it was a funny correspondence...it wasn't. In fact, it never originated at our company, but at a hackers location somewhere in Malaysia. It was a virus that propagated itself by reading each person's address book, and sending a copy of itself to each person in the address book. It took a matter of seconds (yes seconds) to completely bring our company's online activities down (and it took us 3 days to recover). Additionally, this email virus went around the world billions of times in a matter of minutes. A recent episode of Modern Marvels stated that in 2007, there were 2,000,000 (2 million) emails sent every minute. And of those, 70% were spam!
To put that into perspective, consider the following:
That would be 735,840,000,000 spam emails per year (that's 735 billion), or 23,334 per second. If each spam email was the thickness of a piece of paper, a years worth of spam would be 11613.6 miles high (that's the distance from Los Angeles to New York 5 times). At 60 miles per hour, it would take 193 hours (or 8 straight days) just to drive past each spam message generated last year. And, as the Internet gets more popular, we can expect this number to go up, and up, and UP!
Clearly, we need to protect ourselves from this repulsive threat. Here's how you can help yourself. First, give your email address out only to people that need to know it. Yes, give it to clients, put it on your marketing pieces, etc. But never, and I mean NEVER put it online unless absolutely necessary. Some places, such as the MLS, require our email address (at least the board I belong to does), so completely eliminating online email addresses is impossible. But, I restrict it to that. I use a phony email address if I must. When I register software, buy things online, or use other online products or services, I am quite often asked for an email address. Some times this is just so the company can contact me with "special offers" (read SPAM) later on. However, many times they send me a confirmation code or other vital piece of information that I must retrieve, so I can't just type in a non-existent email address. In these cases, I use a dummy email that can be created on Yahoo, gMail, or other free service. I keep an email account just for such times that I need it, but something I don't otherwise check and would have no reason to open emails sent to that address. I know, simply by definition, that any email sent there is spam, and potentially dangerous. Every so often, I delete every message there (without opening them) just to keep the account clean for the times I need it. The Internet contains spiders (programs that automatically search the web) to strip email addresses off online documents. So, if your email address is out there, it will be found, and you will receive ads for online prescription drugs, porn, you name it. If you must put your email address in a document, disquise it. How? Simple. Let's say your email address is MyEmail@FreeService.com. You can put that online as "My Email @ Free Service.com" and instruct the reader to remove the spaces when using it. That way, the Internet spiders and creapy crawlers can't automate it, but the reader can still use it.
The message here is simple...create a dummy email to give out and use online (read for spam creators). Use your business email for just that...business reasons.
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