Email SPAM and what you can do about it

There has been a tremendous increase in the amount of SPAM emails being received by all email users on the Internet in recent months, and we are not the exception. It is not limited to our facility or the UK. It is worldwide and it has been reported on the news.

The spammers have been getting more and more wise as to how to get around spam checking software which is why so many spam emails are currently getting through.

Edge Impact do not provide PC support or advice on the purchase of PC software. We do however suggest you try some or all of the following.

What not to do:

1. Do not select the option to be removed from their distribution lists. This will only give them a legitimate email address to send email to.
2. Do not reply to the email requesting the sender to remove you from the emailing list. Most of the time these emails have used a “From:” address which is not theirs.
3. Do not register your email address on suspect websites.
4. Do not provide your email address to people who are going to sell the contact data on to anyone who wants to purchase it. An example of this is the registration at some exhibitions. If you need to provide an email address for this purpose then setup a temporary email address (using your supplied email Control Panel) and monitor the email coming into the email box.

What can you do about it?

1. Use a product like Microsoft Outlook which puts junk emails into a “Junk E-mail” folder therefore reducing the amount of email you have to go through.
2. Install an anti virus/SPAM filtering product like Norton’s or McAfee on your computer (ask your PC support person for a recommendation).
3. Ensure your virus/SPAM software is updated with the latest changes on a daily basis.
4. If you are using Edge Impact Websites email facilities then logon to your webmail and set the SPAM filter settings. You can access Webmail by going to “www.[YourDomainName]/webmail” or ” http:??webmail.[YourDomainName]” depending on the hosting provided for your domain.
   For SmarterMail webmail do the following:
   1). On the far left menu there is an image with two cogs which when you move your cursor over comes up with Settings. Click that.
   2). On the second menu which will appear on the left of the page, click Filtering and then Spam Filtering.
   3). Click the “Override spam settings for this account”.
   4.) Click the “Actions” tab then specify what actions you want to be taken.
   5.) Click Save at the top to save your settings.    
5. If you receive email from anyone which has lots of email addresses, including your own,in the To: or Cc: fields on the email, ensure you ask the sender to use the Bcc: field instead so that your email address is not distributed to everyone.
6. You can look at the Internet Headers of emails by opening the email and selecting View/Options. This will tell you which IP address the email is coming from. You can then determine who the Internet Service Provider (ISP) is and forward the email to them together with the Internet Header information, requesting them to remove the senders facilities. This however may have the opposite effect, particularly if the email is from an unscrupulous ISP or from a country where there are no regulations. For information on understanding Internet Header information, please contact your PC support person.
7. Forward the original email to the ISPs that provide the spammers facilities. Include the email headers otherwise the associated ISPs will not be able to track the source of the email and will ignore your request. You can get to the email header information by opening the original email (if you received an “undeliverable” email notification then you need to open the attached email if there is one) and in Outlook go to View/Options and copy the content in the Internet Headers box. Forwarded emails do not contain the original header information and most abuse type notification email addresses will automatically delete attachments so you can't just attach the original email to your email. To determine the source of the emails is a bit cryptic. The order of the header lines is reversed so start from the bottom and work up to just above any reference to your domain name - you will see domain addresses in the format "xxxx.net" and IP numbers like 190.130.189.199. Copy all of these and go to www.hexillion.com and right at the bottom of the page paste them into the field, one at a time, and click GO.

Unfortunately there is nothing much you can do to stop people using your domain address as the "From" in their emails. BT have now tightened up on sending emails out with From addresses by requiring the original user and password to be entered in the account definition however most people in the world are not connected to BT and just send out what ever they like and From anyone, besides I am not sure that once you have entered the original account information in BT and send an email from someone else that there is any checking at all - although if there is a complaint there may be a way for BT to track where it came from. There is no way that we can stop this happening because your domain merely receives the email being sent to it. We can up the spam block level on your anti-spam facility for your email address above the normal setting (see 4. above) however you may miss some legitimate email if we do.