Geeks On Site Helps You Get Rid of Spam

Jan. 28, 2011 - PRLog -- These days when you open your email, rather than finding messages from friends and loved ones, you are more likely to find ads, newsletters, events lists and spam telling you to buy conspicuous items or click on a link to enter into a drawing. These bulk mails that intrude the private space of your personal email –and even more aggressively your professional email- have become so common that without giving it much thought we select and delete.

In our previous article Geeks On Site Warns Against Misleading Applications we went through different options to keep unwanted pop-up ads and malware away from your computer. Similarly to protecting your computer against malware, those of you increasingly irritated by the junk in your mailbox can take preventive measures to go back to the days when most of your mail mattered.

As a first rule of thumb, do not give your personal or professional email address to online vendors and other registries that you deem unimportant. Create another email address dedicated just for accessing different sites online, or acquiring free passes to events etc. You can always check your “junk” address when you have time on your hands, but when you are busy unwanted messages will not clutter the inbox of your personal or professional email.

Avoid giving your personal or professional email to third parties or publishing it online. Do not respond to or forward mass emails, and if you really must (the joke is just that funny), do it from your “junk” email address. Most email providers will let you mark unwanted messages as spam, some more efficiently than others. We suggest you use the spam button frequently, but be careful not to accidentally mark as spam messages from important sources.

We often ignore that many messages we receive on a daily basis are not spam as such; we have actually given our contact details to these vendors at one point or another. If your spam filter is just not cutting it, you can always click “unsubscribe” at the bottom of the unwanted email. Admittedly, in some cases unsubscribe links are only another way to obtain and misuse your contact information, but if you think the email is coming from a legitimate source (you recall purchasing from the vendor), you can unsubscribe and be done with it.

If you encounter a particularly persistent spammer, or you receive email irritating enough for you to want to kill its life cycle, you can report the spammer to its Internet Service Provider (ISP). To do this, you will need to read the header information on the spam email that you have received, and detect the ISP information corresponding to the spammer. It is a bit of a complicated process, but there are plenty of tutorials on how to do this online for those of you who have the where with all to do a little investigating.  Once you have the spammer’s ISP information you can email it to the ISP provider, send the ISP provider a letter, or call their customer service line.

Finally, what is a nuisance for some is the livelihood of others: there are many software programs that help you get rid of spam for a moderate fee. These programs have their pros and cons, the biggest of the cons being that oftentimes the programs are so efficient they block legitimate emails too. But as spammers get more sophisticated, so does software, and if you are running a business, purchasing an efficient spam filter could be a reasonable investment. There are even free spam filters available online, for those of you who think spammers do not deserve the attention in dollars.    

For more tips and advice on maintaining your computer by our top notch techs, visit our Geeks On Site Blog at http://www.geeksonsiteusa.com/blog or our website, at http://www.geeksonsiteusa.com.

# # #

We provide computer repair and support for customers all over the U.S. Our computer support services are delivered either via internet or by dispatching one of our computer repair experts to your home or office. For expert computer service call now 888-360-GEEK (4335)!