Section 89. About Spam Email and Outlook Express

89. About Spam Email and Outlook Express

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

About Malware

Spam email has certainly become a plague. Everyone with an email account receives spam eventually. And if you use your email address to register for website memberships and to download software or other files, your email address may be sold to others, and so the deluge of spam email grows over time.

Some spam email can contain viruses and other malware. You may even get spam email that looks like it is from a legitimate website such as eBay that requests you go to a web location and update your personal information. In this example, the web site you go to isn't actually the eBay website, so when you enter your information, it is stolen. The process of sending out emails that look official and take you to websites that are not actually affiliated with the company or service mentioned in the email is known as phishing. Phishing actually leads to many cases of identify theft.

Key Term

Phishing The process of trying to fool people into giving up personal information, including credit card numbers, by directing them to a website using an official-looking email that purports to be from a legitimate website or web service.

Phishing isn't the only hazard related to email. Spam can also be sent that contains viruses or other malware attachments. For example, you might click a filename to open a photo or run a program, and your computer might become infected by the attached malware.

Different email clients, Outlook Express being an example, do provide some protection against spam email. This is accomplished by identifying spam email and creating rules that move suspected spam directly to the trash. Email from certain senders can also be blocked by configuring a blocked sender list.

Some email clients such as Microsoft Outlook (which is part of the Microsoft Office suite and is kind of Microsoft Outlook Express's big brother) provide a built-in spam filter that uses different rules to identify email as junk. The junk email is then placed in a Junk folder, where you can review the email.

Outlook Express doesn't provide a Junk folder by default, but you can set up rules that either move suspect email to a folder you create (a spam folder) or delete the message (or messages) automatically. For help creating rules that filter your email to minimize spam messages, see Configure Outlook Express Rules.