The spam epidemic seems to continue to roll along unabated. Technology vendors are waging the good fight and it appears that legislation at some point will be put in place to deter spammers. However, there are several things that individuals at companies can do on a daily basis separate from IT department activity that can help stem the spam tide. These include:

10. Be careful about opening e-mails from unknown addresses, unless you specifically have an email where you receive unsolicited emails like sales@company.com. Never open attachments unless you know who it was from AND you were expecting it.

9. Forward any spam to the IT department. IT staff will then modify filters to catch messages from the e-mail address so that they do not hit the company e-mail server which will minimize the spam impact company-wide. Try to keep the headers in-tact, this will help the IT department track down the source of the message.

8. Disable outbound HTTP for your email client. In general, your email will not need direct access to a Web server. Spammers are the most frequent users of displaying content from a Web server, and they often capture the email address in the links.

7. Set rules for inbound mail that will automatically catch mail that you have identified as spam. This can include setting rules for certain e-mail addresses, domain names, specific words or phrases and file attachment types/size.

6. Don't open e-mails that appear to contain offensive, sales-oriented or non-business language.

5. Turn off your e-mail client's ability to preview messages – many spam messages have links in that report back to a Web server as soon as you view the message.

4. Don't use your business e-mail address online unless you trust the organization collecting it and you know how it will be used. Go get a disposable account on one of the free email services for situations where you are unsure of how your information will be used.

3. Do not reply in any way to spam since they will now know yours is a good e-mail address and will share it with other spammers. This includes replying via email, telephone, fax or clicking on links within the message. If you want to complain to someone, see our article on tracking down a spammer.

2. Don't use e-mail address when posting to news groups' list servers, chat rooms or bulletin boards. Disguise it with something different like jsmith ‘at’ abc ‘dot’ com instead of jsmith@abc.com.

1. NEVER buy any product or service as a result of a spam message. Spammers only send spam because it is profitable for them to do so. If no one purchased their products this would be a bad advertising vehicle.

Honorable Mention: Windows Users should disable the Windows “Messenger” Service if it is not in use. This rarely used service allows random individuals to pop-up messages on your computer screen. Spammers are quickly trying to exploit this instant messaging-like service.

Some are proactive and some are reactive, but the end result is that these efforts will help increase the amount of spam caught in spam filters and decrease the amount hitting individuals' mailboxes.

Source : IPSWITCH