Junk email is on the increase and if you get emails you’ll have to be prepared to get some of these as no-one has yet found a total cure for banning all of it, but there are things you can do to reduce the problem.

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Keep your email address to yourself.

1. Avoid using the email address given to you by your ISP to sign up for things on the Internet. Set up a free Hotmail (www.hotmail.com) or Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) email address to use whenever you are asked to register for something online, such as a newsletter or membership to a site. If a spammer manages to get hold of your address from this service and starts sending you junk email, it will go to an account that you can walk away from at any time. These free services also have spam filtering, so you can even fight spam on this front.

2. Never post your private email address on any public Web site, forum or newsgroup. The people who send junk mail have programs that automatically search the Internet for email addresses. If you have to post your email address, use the free email account you set up.

3. Ask people you give your email address not to pass it on. Although people may mean well and think it’s great to include you on group messages, it takes just one of these mass emails to fall into the wrong hands, to get you on a spam list.

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Dealing with junk mail

1. Never, ever respond to spam. Responding to spam shows that your email address is active, so the spammer will send you more, plus they will

   probably sell your email address to other spammers.

2. Never click on any “unsubscribe” or “remove” link in a spam email. This is another trick to tell if your email address is active.

3. Learn to set up mail filters in your email program. By doing this you can head off most of the spam that is sent to you by sending it directly to the Junk Mail or Deleted Items folder.

4. Talk to your ISP to see what mail filters they have in place. Several ISPs have become very pro-active in trying to stop spam hitting your in-box as they know the spam upsets their customers and clogs their mail system.

5. Never, ever deal with a company that sends you spam. It may look good, it may seem like a bargain, but if they get results from their advertising they will just keep on spamming.

6. If it all becomes too much, simply change your email address. These days most ISPs offer more than one email address per account, so changing should not be a problem.

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Anti-spam software
There are anti-spam software programs you can buy. The most popular online has been MailWasher (www.mailwasher.net), which has been free, but paying options and more sophisticated versions are being introduced. This program lets you check your emails before downloading them, meaning you save your time and bandwidth by only downloading the email you want. You can even bounce the email back, so the spammer thinks your email address is no longer valid.

Anti-virus software companies like Symantec’s Norton, and McAfee, have anti-spam software you can buy. These should greatly help but again, be aware they may not catch everything.

After spam, the biggest complaint from those online has become an annoying two-letter word: pop-ups. Advertising online has been as much in your face as it can be. So that your eyes do not avoid the sponsorship message, another Web page opens up with the advertisement and you have to click on it to close it.
Here are ways to fight back:

• Some Web browsers - the software you use to surf the Net - are coming with features to try to block the irksome adverts. Firefox, which is an alternative to Internet Explorer, does this effectively. You can download it at www.mozilla.com/firefox/
• Some new anti-virus programs that you can buy, like Symantec’s Norton Internet Security, include attempts to stop pop-ups, but again these have mixed results. Check the backs of boxes of such products before you buy, to see if those editions include something with a name like “pop-up stoppers”.
• Search engine Google is trying to prevent you getting pop-ups when you go to sites accessed through Google. The Google toolbar you can download from toolbar.google.com (if you have Internet Explorer as your Web browser) tries to block the advertising pop-ups. At www.google.com/help/nopopupads.html there’s an explanation why you still get some pop–ups, and some more tips.