[TenTec] Yahoo groups and SPAM

[Duane Grotophorst]

While Yahoo my not be an angel for their methods and
practices they don't deserve to be totally maligned
either. The key is to gain a basic understanding how
these "free" providers like Yahoo and others like it
work. Once you've done that they can be a GOOD TOOL to
FIGHT spam.

Some key guidelines I use:

1) Have multiple email accounts and providers, but
whatever you do be HIGHLY restrictive of how you use
your ISP provided email address. NEVER use it for
public discussion boards like this one. Instead use a
free provider like Yahoo and/or one of the others like
it for posting messages on public discussion boards; -
because your publicly exposed email address WILL get
to spammers eventually no matter what you do
otherwise. 

2) Do not use a POP3 email client with those free
email providers for reading emails from discussions
boards like this one, instead use browser based email.
This provides you an additional layer of abstraction
and in some cases an additional degree of protection
from viruses. Use their tools for email filtering as
well, they are actually USEFULL for blocking spam.
Also DO NOT use any of the free email provider's
address book features.

3) If you have a Yahoo account you won't get spam from
them when you join Yahoo discussion groups. Also as
pointed out already, much of the spam that looks like
it is coming from Yahoo are in fact from spoofed
source addresses.

4) As for the personal data that Yahoo and others like
want,.... well,.... you really don't need to make it
particularly truthful or even complete now do you??
Provide totally bogus info for a third free total
'spam bait' email account that you may want to have.

5) If the spam gets totally out of hand, just ditch
the free email account(s) and start another.

6) Never open spam that didn't get filtered out by the
email provider, first thing to do when going into the
inbox is to select and then delete all of the spam, it
is almost always obvious which ones they are. If you
open any of it you may actually be acknowledging the
validity of your email address. Do not use any ‘auto
preview’ features if they are available either.

7) Use a firewall program, - even if using a dialup
connection. Learn how it works and set it
aggressively, this gives you some additional
protection for worms and Trojans. I've had good luck
with Zone Alarm, and there is a freeware version of it
too. It allows you to explicitly set which programs
have Internet access. It will not let any new
application access the network unless I specifically
give it the OK to do so.

8) Use a Ad/cookie blocking/management program, learn
how it works and set it aggressively. I'm having
pretty good luck with AdSubtract; again there is a
freeware version of it. I only allow cookies from a
very few specific sites, - ALL others are blocked. It
has done a great job of blocking pop-up ads. It speeds
up my Internet access to boot because I'm no longer
wasting bandwidth on ads.

9) You do have a current and updated antivirus
program, don't you??

10) You are keeping up to date with the OS and browser
security patches as well, right??

Duane
N9DG



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