Spam, Virus Hoaxes, and Chain Letters
Spam is the word used for unsolicited junk e-mail.
Much spam is offering products that you probably do not want anyway. Some of it is pornographic. Some will offer you a university degree just by paying up a sum of money.
If you receive spam, just delete it. Some spam invites you to be removed from a list of e-mail addresses just by sending a reply with the word "Remove" in the subject line. If you reply in this way, or indeed any way at all, you are just confirming to the spam generator that your e-mail address actually does exist.
Note that genuine sources sending you e-mail because you have added your name to a list often invite you to reply "remove" if you wish to be removed from the list. Such sources are usually genuine, and not to be confused with spam sources.
Some people who are very keen to suppress the spam industry report spammers to the ISP from which the material originated. This sometimes results in the person being removed from the ISP service, but it does not do much good, because servers like Hotmail make it possible to open a new account so easily.
So just delete it.
How do spam merchants get your address?.
1. If you contribute to a news group using your proper e-mail address. If you have a look at the "properties" of a news group contributor, you will often find that the e-mail address given is corrupted or spurious. That is an attempt by the contributor to prevent his/her address falling into the hands of spam merchants.
2. By "trawling" the many chain letters that circulate on the net. See later.
3. By guessing that particular names exist on public servers like Hotmail.
Some people make part of their income by compiling data bases of genuine e-mail addresses and selling them to mass mailers.
Virus Hoaxes.
A Virus hoax is a type of chain letter. Here is a fragment from one
OFFICIAL IBM VIRUS WARNING. PASS THIS ON TO ANYONE YOU HAVE AN E-MAIL ADDRESS FOR.
If you receive an email titled "Lets watch TV" DO NOT OPEN IT. It will erase everything on your hard drive. This information was announced yesterday morning from IBM; AOL states that "KALI" is a very dangerous virus, much worse than "Melissa," and that there is NO remedy for it at this time. Some very sick individual has succeeded in using the reformat function from Norton Utilities causing it to completely erase all documents on the hard drive.
The typical signs of a virus hoax are:
Do not pass such warnings on. Sending them to all your friends, who send them to all their friends, who send..... simply results in the net being clogged with spurious panic warnings. And see below regarding chain letters and spammers.
How do I know that a warning is a hoax?
Firstly check with a reliable source. The one the author uses is Sophos. http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/hoaxes//
Sophos has a list and explanation of all the known hoaxes and scares as they come to hand. Sophos also has a list of all the genuine viruses and remedies.
How do I get a virus from e-mail?
By not being vigilant. By not having anti-virus software or not keeping it up to date.
E-mail viruses can come to you in two ways.
To deal with threat number 1, do not click on attachment names to open them without suitable precautions. Have good anti-virus software installed. Save attachments to your desktop where you can check them for viruses; good virus software often captures the virus at this point and refuses to save an infected file without cleaning it first.
Safe attachments. Picture files like jpg and gif are safe, but only if genuine. For example, a file named nakedlady.jpg may really have a name nakedlady.jpg.exe. See E-mail Attachments
Unsafe attachments. exe com inf reg and many more.
To deal with threat number 2.
Send your e-mail in plain text. This will not prevent you from getting a script virus, but it will prevent you from passing it on to other people.
Disable Windows Scripting Host.
Apply the latest Microsoft critical update packages.
Chain letters.
Many chain letters consist of jokes passed on to you by friends, and sometimes so good that you want to pass them on. By all means do. Others are pathetic stories of little children in war torn areas. Some chain letters are just preying on the gullibility of readers - if you don't pass it on you will get bad luck, and so on .......
The main thing to do if you are forwarding chain letters is to edit out the list of addresses. If you click on the "Forward" button for any e-mail you will see what I mean. Many people just forward such material thoughtlessly, with the result that as the letter passes on its way it accumulates a growing list of genuine e-mail addresses. This is a gold mine for the spam merchants who collect e-mail addresses.
Chain letters are also used for pyramid marketing. They ask you to send a small sum like $5 to the address at the top of the list, delete that address, add your own to the bottom of the list, and send it out to all your friends.
Do not do what they ask. Very few people make any money out of pyramid marketing except the people who started the chain.
© James Nelson, 2001.