General Advice about Spam Mail

1. Companies finding the Internet an easy and cheap way in which to send advertising emails.
   • Sexual nature, or
   • Genuine products but you are not interested anyway.
2. Organised crime tempting you to a false website to authenticate your banking details.  They then have your signon details and you money.  Notice how there is an increase in these types of emails just before month end when many people are paid and before the mortgage goes out, targeting the time when funds are at their highest within that bank account.
3. To distribute emails to fill and clog computer systems and bring down mail servers under extreme load.
4. Viral attacks either to log your key presses (2 above) or distribute further email (3 above) or virus replication from your computers to attack organisations, financial, Governmental or key prime targets without your knowledge.
5. Cyber Terrorism, terrorism online, and the fear:-
   • To bring down computer systems, financial institutions, Governmental and key targets.
   • To corrupt children, porn, gaming, gambling that a reasonable parent would not like a young teen expose to.

Well firstly you need to ensure that you don't get a virus.  So how do you do this?  Well here are some examples:-

	Never click on a link from an email asking you to authenticate your signon details to a financial institution.  They will never contact you by email anyway as they will send you a letter in the post (and so they can charge you for doing so).
	Never open an email attachment (even from a friend or colleague) if you did not ask for it.  Give them a quick telephone call and ask them what it was they sent you.  If it was a virus sending it to you without their knowledge, then they will not know.  Delete the email.  Keep your anti virus software up to date.  A free for private use is AVG and is available freely from Grisoft at http://free.grisoft.com/.
	Never visit an Internet you do not trust and just download files.  Viruses can be embedded in music, video and images.  Your browser can be hijacked and downloadable objects installed.  To combat this, ensure you keep your computers operating system up to date (for Windows use Windows Update) and use a good anti hijack software like SpyBot Search and Destroy.

So you have followed the above examples but I have received something in my mailbox.  What do I do?

Never reply to the spammer asking to unsubscribe.  They will have verified that your email address is active.  They will then sell this as a confirmed email address to other email marketing companies (spammers) who will continue to email you.  Your address will be sold on and on and your mailbox will grow of spam.  Instead, forward the email to spam@SpamSafeMail.net and our systems will learn from its mistake enabling you and others a better email system free of the junk unwanted emails.

Never open and follow a link from a spammer.  They can verify your email address by doing so.  Again they will sell on your email address.  Please forward the email so spam@SpamSafeMail.net as above.

	Never forward emails informing others of a potential virus.  They probably do not have the technical knowledge to manually deal with it and if they are keeping their anti-virus software up to date then it will not be a problem any way.  What is a problem is the number of email messages that a mail server has to handle that is the same message.   The poor user can end up with hundreds of messages from anxious friends spamming them about a virus that in all probability does not exist.  The spammer can harvest all these forwarded addresses in the emails history and sell onwards.
	When forwarding emails, please ensure that you remove any email addresses from the history.
	Report spam by forwarding it with email address history to spam@SpamSafeMail.net