Security

General tips

The advice in Step 6 of Dealing With Spam will help you deal with spam which you are already receiving. However, there are also things that you can do to stop spammers getting hold of your email address:

1. Never reply to a spam email
   - If you receive a spam email, don't reply to it. It can be very tempting to hit reply and fire off a rant. Unfortunately, this tends to cause one of two things to happen:
   • You may be replying to a forged email address. The owner of that email address will know nothing, and can do nothing, about the spam being sent.
   • Even worse, you're basically telling a spammer that your email address is a valid one. Not only does this mean they'll probably send you even more spam, but they will be able to sell your email address on to other spammers as a known 'good address'.
   
   
2. Signing guestbooks
   - If you're signing a guestbook on a website, or use a public discussion forum, don't include your email address.
   
3. Be anti-social!
   - If you use a social networking site, don't allow your email address to be seen by the general public. Even better, set up an alias as shown above, then you can easily change it if you need to. If genuine friends find you and get in touch, you can always give them your real email address to use.
   
4. Keep your email in check!
   - When ordering anything online, make sure you look at all the information on the order page, particularly anything requiring a tick box. Many companies will want to send you special offers, and in most cases you may well want to receive them. However, if they also want to send your information on to third parties, will you know which companies they are?
   
5. Use blind copies when emailing groups
   - If you want to email a group of people, make sure you use the 'Bcc' option in your email software, not the 'Cc' option. This will stop the people receiving the email from seeing who else has received it, protecting their email addresses.
   
6. Never forward chain emails
   - Friends and colleagues will often send emails about the latest Internet virus, or a message which you must pass on to X number of friends. In most cases, these are hoax emails and waste the time of anyone reading them. If you receive an email like this, take a look through - it isn't uncommon to find hundreds of email addresses from people who have sent the email to everyone in their address book. If that email is found by a spammer, you can be sure they'll use the addresses.
   
7. Don't preview your email!
   - Don't use the preview pane option in your email software. Although you may find this feature useful, an email containing graphics will often also contain a unique reference code. By simply reading the email, you're telling a spammer that your email address is valid. At the very least you should turn off the option to display images in emails. You can always choose to display images in an email if you know it's from a trusted source.
   
8. Be suspicious
   - If you receive an email regarding suspicious activity on your bank account or a popular website, don't click any links. If you really want to check things out, type in the website address list on the email. If a complete stranger walked up to you in the street and asked you to give them your credit card details because of a problem with your bank, would you?