The Pros’ Answers:
Ellen Rohr, Production Manager
“One of the important things to keep in mind in staying off spam lists is the mailing lists you sign up for. It is a good idea to have an alternate email address to collect any mail sent to you from a mailing list. For example, I am very big into genealogy and am on a number of genealogy newsgroups. When I post a message to the message board, the inquiry gets posted permanently to the web. When the spam bots as they are called come through, they grab my email address and before I know it, I start receiving spam. To prevent that spam coming in with my regular mail, I use an alternate address for those postings, so that I can easily filter out the spam. Free email addresses are available through http://www.hotmail.com and http://www.yahoo.com for this purpose.”
Tom Erickson, Business Development & Information Technology Consultant
“Finally something is happening in the State of Wisconsin. Just go to http://www.SpamIsBad.com and select “News – Wisconsin”. Particularly, read the article recently published by the Business Journal “State moves to can spam”. Anti-spam bills are being introduced by both parties.
We advise everyone to contact your legislator – see “Petition Wisconsin Legislature” under “Articles: Call to Action” upper right. This includes a link to find your legislator’s name and email address. In fact, we were in contact with Senator Kanavas back in July, one of the sponsors of a recently introduced anti-spam bill. This is a perfect time to let your legislator know how you feel about spam.
We will continue to track anti-spam legislation and technology. We think legislation is just one part of the solution. Our Anti-Spam/Anti-Virus filtering system is working extremely well. But ultimately the protocol used by Internet email (SMTP) must be improved with authentication (the ability to identify the sender). One of the biggest problems is that spammers can send email using someone else’s email address. You will find links to several proposals in the “Links” section of SpamIsBad (scroll down to “Anti-spam Technology”).”
Kristen Kosek, Internet Marketing Consultant
“I have been able to curb a lot of the spam I receive by gently reminding friends and family about sending forwards. Almost everyone has sent a forwarded email, be it a joke or so-called “amazing offer”. When a forward is sent, most senders add everyone in their address book to the Cc: (carbon copy) field. When you receive the forward, all the emails the forward was sent to will be in plain view, along with the emails from previous forwarders. All it takes is one forward to get to a spammer, and the spammer instantly has a massive list of emails to bombard with spam. Viruses can also put email addresses into the wrong hands. When a user gets a virus, the virus will then send the virus to everyone in the user’s address book, and so on.
I have encouraged friends and family to enter email addresses in the Bcc: (blind carbon copy) field to hide them from other recipients. I have also asked that if they have a joke they just have to forward, to cut the joke portion of the email out and paste it into a new email, sending it to my email address only. That way, I don’t have to search through lines and lines of emails to get to the joke, or worry about others getting my email address. It’s nice when someone wants to share information, but please don’t share my email address with spammers!”
Finally, if you haven’t tried our Anti-Spam/Anti-Virus System, please contact us at 262-820-8201 to learn more. The capabilities of the new system are phenomenal!
What would you like to ask the pro? Email your questions to askthepro@onyourmark.com!
