The Online World resources handbook

Electronic mail, telex, and fax http://home.eunet.no/~presno/bok/7.html
You may be at the receiving end. For more on anonymous mail, check out the
alt.privacy.anon server newsgroup.
The files RFC 1113 through 1115 are about 'Privacy enhancements for Internet
electronic mail'.
Usenet has alt.privacy (Privacy issues in cyberspace), alt.security.pgp,
comp.society.privacy, comp.security.pgp.announce, comp.security.pgp.tech,
comp.security.pgp.discuss, comp.security.pgp.resources, and more.
Junk mail
Junk mail, also called spam, is one of the curses of modern society. Spam is email
messages that you never asked for, unsolicited commercial mail distributed to many
people simultaneously. Typically, they contain advertising of some product, service,
business, scheme, Web site, etc. Sometimes, such mail promote political ideas.
Junk mail takes time to retrieve, browse, and delete, one by one. It distracts. For
some, it may grow out of proportions, and become a major nuisance. Most users must
pay to receive it, to a local phone company or an Internet service provider.
What to do? If you get on someone's mailing list, you can ask the sender to take
you off that list. This may help a little, but not much! There are too many spammers out
there. Besides, now the unscrupulous sender will know that your address is valid, and
you will undoubtedly received more of the same!
Personally, I delete them, and keep quiet. My communications costs are low, and it
takes too much effort to get off that list.
Others go a long way to protect themselves by being wary of giving out their email
addresses, and of subscribing to newsgroups and mailing lists. However, sadly enough,
the only 100 percent effective method is to close your mail account, and open another
one. Then you should safe, but only for a while...
If you're at all active on the net, your address will be picked up by spammers. It's
so easy! Programs like Email Magnet can scan Web sites, newsgroups, and chat
channels to retrieve any string looking like an email address.
When you buy online or ask for information about something, your email address
usually ends up in a database. Many online vendors sell their collection of addresses to
others with information about what browser you are using, the domain you are calling in
from, etc. Others consolidate your data with information from hundreds of other
databases, each having some other bits of information about your use of the net,
preferences, buying habits, etc.
List brokers offer megabytes of lists or CD ROMs full of addresses to anyone
willing to pay. Organizations and individuals offer to send spam mail to names in their
private databases. For a fee, of course.
Filtering is option. Most modern email programs have a filtering function that lets
you automatically send spams to Trash. They'll filter out mail from given senders, and if
they find certain strings in the subject title or the body of the text.
Example: Some dangerious virus distribution schemes are set to send dangerous code in
seemingly empty messages. They exploit a hole in the way .html is being displayed in email
messages.
To delete mails that are obiously hostile, I let my email program (Eudora Pro) search
the body of the incoming mail for the string , and send them
directly to trash.
Another filter searches headers of incoming mails for aol.com (some hostile mails
have this in common), and marks mails containing this string red in the list of incoming
mails. In this way, it is easy for me to delete mails that are evidently unimportant, or if
needed, to investigate their contents in a more careful way.
Finally, consider using non Microsoft email programs like Pegasus Mail or Eudora
Lite (both are free. This will make you less exposed to these risks. Don't open unlikely
looking mail, like a message from the tax man with the subject "I love you". It almost
certainly contains the infamous "I love you" virus. Don't forget that you can get viruses in
attached Microsoft Word documents, too.
Spam stoppers are used to prevent hostile software to pick up your email address from
Usenet newsgroup. A spam stopper is additional characters that makes your address
invalid while making it possible for real users to find out what your real address looks
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