CSBJ Daily

Now, I’m sure that you are all happy at your jobs and don’t have your resume posted on the nation’s leading online job/recruitment site, monster.com. Which is good, because they were hacked over a week ago and people have been receiving phishing emails that use personal data to convince you to click on them.

If you get an email (not necessarily from monster.com) that sounds like a legitimate email, beware.

…and now for something completely useful.

Do you use an out-of-office auto-reply? Did you know that your auto reply also goes to every piece of junk mail you get? that’s almost as bad as clicking on every link in every junk mail you’ve ever recieved.

That’s why it’s important to keep your junk mail filters well-tuned. A good filter will stop the junk mail before it gets to the auto-reply process. Most of us have a simple junk mail filter on our email client [outlook, thunderbird, mail, eudora etc.], and most of us have a server-based junk mail filter [aol has one, msn has one, but so does everybody with their own domain name such as memorialhealthsystem.com]. If you don’t use some kind of filtering, then every piece of mail, legitimate and otherwise, gets your auto-reply.

If you don’t keep things well-tuned, your junk email will multiply like proverbial electric rabbits. Prevention is, of course, key - and there are two kinds. 1) don’t type your email address into a web page unless you mean to. …and by mean to I mean that it should be a site you went to, not one that came to you [via pop-ups or junk mail]. 2) don’t let your email address show up on the web - anybody who’s launched a website learned this the hard way. Junk mail people run programs that crawl the web searching for email addresses [pretty easy to do - it’s a simple pattern: xxx@yyy.zzz] then they send you a tentative junk mail. If you click anything in it, or let your email program download images in it, or reply to it, they know it’s legit, and the flood begins. They sell your email address to others, and before you know it, Ivana from Russia is making you offers you can’t bear to read.

Have control over your own webpages? Know someone who does? Ask them to use obfuscation to conceal your email address from these web crawlers. It won’t help much for existing emails, but it’s good prevention for new emails.

By default, your email program won’t download images in emails unless you tell it to for various senders [have you added our daily email to your safe senders list?]. Also, it won’t reply to all your messages by default unless you tell it to while you are on vacation. The first time you do that, you’ll come back to a huge litter of electric bunnies.

You can also use the blind carbon copy to minimize exposure of your email addresses and those of your colleagues. There are other reasons as well, but if one of your colleagues is infected with a virus that uploads their address book to a spam hause, you may not be included if they never knew your email address, thanks to the BCC.

Also, most of us have multiple email addresses. If I suspect using my email address in some application or form will generate me some junk mail, I use an auxillary account on hotmail or gmail.

Do you know how many junk mail filters you have? Ask your admin or guru to help you through any settings at all. They hate spam more than you do. They’ll be happy to help.

Last but not least; do you know why they call it Spam? (Now with japanese subtitles!)