Section 14.5. Fighting Email Pests | iPhone: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

14.5. Fighting Email Pests

As helpful and convenient as the Internet can be, it's also a fairly lawless land. Email has become a tool of sleazy, shady individuals, so treat all messages from strangers with a skeptical eye and a cautious mouse. Many of the programs mentioned in Chapter 21 can help protect you and your computer from two of the Internet's biggest infectious parasites: spam and viruses.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Who Moved My Graphics?

Hey, what's the deal? My incoming messages in Outlook Express have big white gaps in them, with a red X where a picture ought to be .

Like any good email program, Outlook Express lets you see photos and graphics mixed in with the message text. Sometimes, though, you'll just see a blank frame with a red X instead of the image.

Turns out Outlook Express is sanitizing your email for your protection.

A common spammer tactic is to send you a message that seems to contain a graphicbut, in fact, contains only a reference to a graphic that's actually retrieved from a Web site somewhere. Your email program fetches the graphic at the moment you open the message . The request for the image is a signal that lets the spammers know that their message has fallen on fertile grounda live sucker who actually looks at these messages.

Activating a so-called Web bug in this way is an open invitation for even more spam.

Outlook Express, in other words, is not showing you the image that's supposed to appear because it's trying not to transmit that "Hey, this sucker just opened your message" signal.

That's why the message at the top of the window says, "Some pictures have been blocked to help prevent the sender from identifying your computer."

If you know the sender, and that she was just emailing you some photos, click the banner to reveal the images. But if you've never heard of the sender and see that it's spam, delete the message. And take pleasure in the fact that you've just ruined some spammer's day.

14.5.1. Spam

Because it's inexpensive and efficient, email is a great communication tool for people to keep in touch with each other, but those qualities also attract people trying to make a buck. Unsolicited email ads have increased exponentially since email first began to gain traction in the 1990s. Junk mailbetter known as spam now constitutes 80 percent of the messages sent around the Internet.

Note: The term spam comes from a famous Monty Python sketch about a caf menu that features spam in just about every dish (" Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce served in the Proven §ale manner with shallots and aubergines, garnished with truffle pat , brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam ") and Vikings who nonsensically sing the word over and over. (Get it? They drown out the legitimate conversations going on around them.)

Most spam messages are designed to hawk products of questionable legality (bootleg software, pharmaceuticals , and so on), and come in such volume that your mailbox can easily get flooded in a single day. Other forms of junk mail may be from sites or services you've used on the Web, but forgot to uncheck the box next to the "Send me information about special offers" when you signed up to download that free media player or program update.

You may even get junk mail the first day you open your email account. Spammers use programs that crunch through millions of potential variations of email addresses, and then spew messages to those addresses whether they're real working addresses or not. (Why not? It's free.)

Even though laws have been passed against sending spam, tracking down the perpetrators is difficult because most return addresses are forged (also referred to as spoofed ). Worse, many messages begin, or are routed through, other countries , where U.S. laws have no leverage.

Spam can also contain viruses sent by people who would love nothing more than to plant a program on your computer that lets them control your machine from afar. Once spammers plant a control program on your PC, they can turn your machine into a relay station that secretly shovels out even more spamright over your own Internet connection. You don't even notice except perhaps for the fact that your PC seems to be getting slower in its old age.

Here are some ways to cut spam out of your mailbox's diet:

Don't ask for it . When filling out forms on the Web, turn off the checkboxes that say, "Yes, send me exciting offers and news from our partners ."
Don't reply to spam . Don't click the "Remove Me" link on a junk message; it's usually a trick. Doing this tells the spammer he's got a live one on the hook. You'll get even more junk in your mail trunk.
Get a spam filter . Most email programs and ISPs already use spam filters that are supposed to block junk before it even gets to your inbox.

But if they're not doing the trick, you can supplement them with add-on antispam programs that you buy yourself. Internet security programs like Trend Micro can snag, tag, and dump spam right to the Trash. Granted, you still have to download the messages and let the filter weed out the junk, but junk filters make it faster to see all the garbage at once and dump it with one click.
Rules . Set up some message rules, as described in Section 14.4.3, that auto-flag messages as spam that have subject lines containing trigger words like "Viagra," "Herbal," "Mortgage," "Refinance," "Enlarge Your," and so on.
Create a private account . If you're overrun by spam, consider sacrificing an email address to the public areas of the Internet, like chat rooms, online shopping, Web site and software registration, and newsgroup posting. Spammers use automated software robots that scour every public Internet message and Web page, recording email addresses they find. That's how they got your address in the first place. Using this technique, at least you've restricted the junk mail to one, secondary email account.

When spammers find your disposable address and your mailbox starts overflowing again, dump the account and make another free one to use as your disposable mail pickup window.

Meanwhile, your principal, separate, private email accountwhich you only give out to friends , family, and business associatesstays out of sight and off the grid because you never use it when filling out a Web form, posting on a message board, or other public forum.

14.5.2. Viruses

Email viruses have found a friend in spam, and some criminals are using the blended threat of unsolicited mass mail with a virus payload tucked inside the message. Email viruses, like Melissa in 1999 and ILOVEYOU in 2000, used infected attachments to propagate themselves to every email recipient in a computer's address book, destroyed files, and shut down entire office networks. New Windows viruses are turned loose every day.

Many viruses appear to be coming from people you know (they snatch addresses from your address book), so the old advice to open attachments only from acquaintances isn't entirely foolproof.

The best way to stay safe is to be alert and keep your Windows antivirus program up to date. Many of the Internet security suites mentioned in Chapter 21 include spam filters along with antivirus and antispyware components . They're designed to separate the wheat from the spam-encrusted virusesand catch them if they happen to escape onto your computer.

If you use the Internet frequently, installing protective software is becoming almost mandatory for safe online computing in general. The ones that smack down spam make life online a little bit better.