Disaster-Proofing Your Email Inbox
or How I Learned to Deal With the Nasty Side of Email

Much has been made of the recent rash of email viruses plaguing the world. Email viruses are more than a nuisance and can damage entire mail servers as well as individual machines, temporarily cutting off a person or group from the rest of the world. Aside from viruses, there's also spam or the Internet equivalent of junk mail, another annoyance that affects your inbox. This month we'll tackle the email side of Net Annoyances

Ah-Choo!
Viruses have hit the big time, folks! They're in the news and they're affecting millions of people. How many of you have had your online lives interrupted by a virus lately? I, myself, have scurried around the office helping co-workers and our IT department conduct damage control after the I Love You virus hit. The latest and greatest is the Anna virus that preys upon people's interest in a particular Russian-born tennis player.

Things to remember in order to protect yourself from viruses
Be wary of email that isn't from a person you know or has no sender listed.
Be wary of email that has an attachment that isn't a common format. Common formats are .jpg or .gif for images, .zip or .sit for compressed files, .swf or .gif for animations, and .exe for those cute little programs that are time wasters, usually.

These basics are just a first step but they'll go a long way in protecting your computer.

The I Love You and Anna viruses were written and distributed in such a way that they take advantage of people's emotions and curiosity. They spread themselves by sending themselves out of their victims' email accounts to everyone in the victim's contact list, thereby successfully circumventing the first rule above.

They also increase their chances of infecting a computer by playing upon folk's openness to warm wishes (I Love You) and their desire to see a choice shot of Anna Kournikova (Anna). If their victim's had practiced the second rule, they would have been fine as each of these viruses' malicious attachments had a .pif extension.

What it all boils down to is that you need to be aware of emails that you're opening, just like you still look both ways before you cross the street!

SPAM...not Spiced Ham!
Spam is the term used to indicate unsolicited, or unknowingly solicited, email marketing campaigns, hawking everything from get-rich-quick schemes to time shares to free cell phones with 100,000 free minutes. Some unlucky folks see more spam than legitimate mail in their inboxes.

What can be done?

If you use one of the more popular free email services, like Yahoo or Hotmail, they have Bulk Sender/Spamguard options that filter most spam. Most email clients, like Eudora, Outlook, and Outlook Express have mail filtering ability. Refer to the Help files in these programs to see how to activate and utilize this feature.

If you are a power browser, going to and fro, using this service or that service, taking advantage of unbeatable deals that require only to sign up for a free weekly email, then you may want to consider creating a faux/false/spam-only email account for these services.

See, chances are that your free service isn't as free as you thought it was. The price usually ends up being your demographic information and email address, which can be sold to other companies and so on and so forth. You probably don't want to know more, believe me!

The 'nut' of it, as a Georgian I know says, is that your inbox can be a very dangerous place. With a little caution and common sense, though, it doesn't have to be.

Now go and spread the word!

Chris Springmeyer
Teacher Universe Technical Services Specialist

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