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Ten Rules for easy and safe E-mail
- 1. Never, NEVER open E-mail from someone you don’t know or weren’t expecting E-mail from.
- 2. Never, NEVER, NEVER (Did I mention Never?), NEVERRR! Open E-mail attachments EVEN FROM PEOPLE YOU DO KNOW unless you were expecting them. The reason: Their computer may have an email-sending virus. Nonsensical subject lines are a dead giveaway.
- 3. Get an Antivirus program and make sure you KEEP IT UPDATED. There are free ones available that are every bit as good as the overpriced ones. I use AVG Antivirus. You can get the free version Here.
- 4. If you use Outlook Express or Outlook, disable the preview pane. Some E-mails can execute a virus from the preview. Scan your new E-mails and delete any suspect E-mails BEFORE you start reading them. Consider an alternate eMail program. I use the free program Thunderbird. It has better security and a nicer look than Outlook Express.
- 5. The FBI, CIA, NSA, your bank, Paypal, eBay, Microsoft, the Nigerian Lottery Commission, or anybody else will NOT send you an E-mail asking for your password, credit card number, Social Security number, to wire them money, or to offer you a security update. All such E-mails should be regarded as fakes. DO NOT OPEN ATTACHMENTS FROM THEM EITHER!
- 6. You WILL get junk E-mail (Spam). You can reduce it to manageable proportions by choosing an E-mail address with both letters and numbers, using your Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) antispam settings (Check with your ISP, they vary in this), don’t give your address out to anybody you don’t want E-mail from (sounds silly, but all kinds of places will ask for it!), and if you do any online shopping, consider getting a second, free E-mail address (Yahoo and Hotmail are two) for shopping and other stuff. Let that mailbox soak up the ads.
- 7. NEVER, NEVER respond to Spam! Reputable merchants you have bought something from will send you promotional E-mails. This is not Spam. You can unsubscribe from reputable E-mails. Responding to Spam only makes it worse- Now they know your E-mail address works.
- 8. NEVER post your E-mail address on a website! This will guarantee massive spam. If you must, post it like this: johnqpublic(at)isp(dot)com. You don’t have to do it exactly that way, but spell out the “@” and the “dot”. That way automated spam-sending programs won’t harvest it.
- 9. Don’t forward that latest “virus warning”, “product safety alert”, “dying kid’s last wish”, or anything else that tells you to send it to everybody you know. These are almost universally hoaxes. Some can do real harm, but at best they are nothing but gossip. Delete them.
- 10. Be polite to your E-mail buddies. If you have high-speed Internet, remember that some of your friends still have dial-up. Pay attention to the size of the files (Especially Pictures!) you send out. A 1 Mb file takes 5-7 minutes to download on dial-up! Also, instead of forwarding that joke that’s been forwarded a thousand times, copy and paste just the joke into a new E-mail. And use the BCC (Stands for Blind Carbon Copy- you can send copies to everybody, but nobody knows you sent it to anybody else!) function on your E-mail so your recipients don’t get a message cluttered up with everybody else’s E-mail address (Some folks are very sensitive about that, and I don’t blame them!).
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