Email has opened up the world to instant communication but abuse has become a World Wide problem; with bloated mail, fwd hoaxes, fraud, junk mail aka spam, and viruses.
As a consumer you need to know how to protect yourself and how to prevent being used by others.
The first step is to get smart on how email works. You open an account which is assigned an address: username@domain.
Usually your ISP (Internet Service Provider) will offer free email accounts. The size of your mailbox may be set between 5-10MB. It would be smart to treat your ISP mail account like an unlisted telephone number. Use it for your trusted personal or business emails ONLY.
Spam! Junk mail that you never asked to recieve is clogging up mailboxes and causing havoc throughout the business world. While complete elimination of SPAM is next to impossible, there is a way to fight back. It is easy to sign up for free email accounts, like Yahoo or Hotmail. I suggest getting one to use like a listed phone number. When you sign up for access to websites and other services, always use your public account. This is how spammers get most of their email addresses. Yahoo has a filter setup where you can flag most spam through word string associations such as "lower your interest rates" within the body of the email, and it will put the suspected pieces in a "bulk folder". This makes it easy to identify spam and delete it w/o even bothering to open it. If you follow this simple procedure your personal email account should be hit by very little SPAM.
Viruses are not only a very real pain, they create a financial burden on both consumers and the business community. By following a few basic safety tips you should be able to avoid infection and spreading it on to others. First you should be using a good Anti-virus program (if you don't have one check out the link at the end of this paragraph for a free anti-virus program). Keep it updated at least once a month (or when a new virus warning comes out). NEVER open any kind of attachment you are unsure of. A new breed of viruses are being spread with the following file extensions: exe (unless you are expecting an exe file from a known trusted source), scr (free screensaver offers) while some may be legit they are not worth the risk of infection, pif (NEVER open a vbs, shs, or especially a pif file which has become the #1 source of many new viruses, it is sneaky and may appear to come from a known source). I've recently heard of a new virus that spreads through your browser when visiting websites from links within emails from unknown sources. Beware of any email with bad spelling errors, just delete and forget about them. For more on Viruses http://www.pcmag.com/ http://www.europe.f-secure.com/virus-info/tips.shtml or for a very good free anti virus program http://www.free-av.com/ .
BLOATED EMAIL is slowing down the internet and can be easily avoided. You can help by just observing a few basic tips.
Do you suffer from email forwarding compulsive disorder?
Do you fwd more than one email a day to everyone in your address book?
Are you lazy when you do it and just hit fwd to everyone?
STOP IT NOW! (This is very important)
To begin with you are passing around email addresses including your own. Some very unscrupulous people have figured out how to use internet hoaxes to harvest email addresses for spammers. If you have a list of friends who enjoy passing around fwd emails, I have a few basic etiquette rules to suggest that will help make the internet better for all users.
First, check that email you recieved before passing it on. Is it real or just a hoax? Passing on hoaxes is like second hand gossip. Good resources for checking on email hoaxes:
http://www.datafellows.fi/news/hoax.htm
http://www.snopes.com/
http://www.breakthechain.org/
http://www.vmyths.com/
Most email clients allow you to put together mail lists, use one of these to create your "fwd to" mail buddies list. Use it instead of fwd to everybody in your address book. You can easily add or subtract people from your list. When you fwd, put their addresses under Bcc as this keeps them hidden. If possible cut and paste from the fwd email into a new email, this will eliminate all the old fwd text boxes and repeated text, which will decrease the file size of your email (it also removes any hidden code that fwds it to an email address collector). You might also consider contacting those on your buddy list with the following suggestion, "Please let us know if your going to be out of touch for a while, so that we don't fill up your mailbox." If a persons mailbox gets full with "fwd messages" important email might get bounced and lost.
Consider setting your email preference/options to one of the following (these options may vary depending upon your program):
Do not include original message
Let me choose if I want to include original message
Only include part of the original message
Why should I worry about Bloated email?
Reducing the size of your emails is a personal responsibility.
You save space in peoples mailboxes.
You also reduce crowding of the internet through reduction of the bandwidth it takes for your emails.
If everyone used smart email practices, we could all enjoy faster connection times because there would be less traffic.
I'll help you visualize the problem.
Every second, millions of e-mails are traveling through miles of wire, routers and switches to get to their destination.
When you surf the net, you are also traveling on the same network of routers, switches, and hundreds of thousands of miles of wire.
If you send a regular e-mail, chances are it is less than 5k in size. If you use a mail program like incrediMail your email size jumps up to 40k very quickly when you fancy it up. Please consider using it sparingly. I know it looks pretty, but MOST emails are an exchange of words.
A Bloated e-mail carries a message plus all of the old baggage that you sent with it. I've recieved fwd messages that were over 100k on a regular basis and at least once or twice a week I'll get one over 250k. The 100k is 20x the size it could have been. Now go one step further, let's consider the results of a fwd email to a list of just 25 people.
The bloated email of 100k would use 2500k of bandwidth compared to only 125k if your fwd email was 5k. Imagine 1,000,000 people doing the same thing. 2,500 GB compared to 125 GB. No wonder the internet is running slow.
It has been estimated that 30 billion emails are sent around the world every day and that one third are SPAM (NewScientist.com news service).
So you can see why this is an important topic. If we can reduce the sizes of our emails by just half, the effects on the WWW would be very significant. It would require very little effort from each of us to accomplish this goal. Imagine being able to surf the WWW in half the amount of time without resorting to DSL or Cable connections.
If you want to pass this information on to friends or co-workers, copy the URL and paste it into your emails. It will take less file size than sending the whole text. You have my permission to print this page and post it.
The NightWriter
