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What is a “Phishing Scam”? In computing, a Phishing Scam is an attempt to fraudulently and/or criminally acquire information that may be sensitive, such as passwords, credit card details, etc, by disguising yourself as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out by email or instant messaging. Phishing is basically a way to fool users into divulging sensitive information.

How can you keep safe? Well, is easy, just follow these useful steps:

• If you get an email or pop-up message that asks for personal or financial information, do not reply and close it immediately. Do not click on any links that you aren’t sure of. Phishers can make links look like they go to one place, but that actually send you to a different site. Legitimate companies don’t ask for this kind of sensitive information via email.
• Make sure you have a up to date firewall and anti-virus. A firewall is a great way to protect yourself from hackers and unauthorized users. Anti-virus is also a great way to do the same, and to keep you from downloading viruses by accident.
• Try to review your credit card and bank account statements as soon as you receive them to check for any charges that you didn’t authorize.
• Be cautious about opening any attachment or downloading any files from emails you receive, regardless of who sent them. Even if the email is from somebody you know and trust, they may have gotten a virus and the virus could have used his/her email to send out other viruses.

Its not much, but it sure helps.

Filtering spam is not a very fun experience. It takes a long time, and if you just don’t check your Junk Folder, one of your much needed emails might get deleted. Fortunately, there’s smart software that can get rid of the nasty spam in your Inbox, and keep what you want. And even more fortunately, some of this software is free.

The TOP 5 free spam filters.

1. POPFile

POPFile is an automatic mail classification tool. Once properly set up and trained, it will scan all email as it arrives and classify it based on your training. You can give it a simple job, like separating out junk e-mail, or a complicated one-like filing mail into a dozen folders. Think of it as a personal assistant for your inbox.

Unfortunately, POPFile can grow a heavy on your computer memory and cpu load if you have trained it to work on lots of mail, so be careful.

2. Spamihilator - Free Spam Filter

Spamihilator works between your EMail client and the Internet and examines every incoming EMail. Useless spam emails will be filtered out. This process runs completely in the background. It uses a Word Filter and a Learning Filter to do its job.

One problem is that you cannot remotely administer or teach Spamihilator, but that isn’t to big of a deal.

3. Spamato - Free Spam Filter

Spamato filters POP and IMAP accounts for spam. It includes plug-ins that make it easy to use in Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. Spamato contains graphical statistics that explain the efficiency of every single filter as well as the overall effectiveness of the whole system. You can also adjust several settings and see why a particular message has been regarded spam or ham.

Spamato is for advanced users however, as it has multiple options and little help.

4. K9 - Free Spam Filter

K9 is an email filtering application that works in conjunction with your regular POP3 email program and automatically classifies incoming emails as spam (junk email) or non-spam without the need for maintaining dozens of rules or constant updates to be downloaded. It uses intelligent statistical analysis that can result in extremely high accuracy over time.

K9 is for standard POP3 email accounts only. It does not directly support Hotmail, AOL or any other kind of webmail type systems, nor does it support SSL or secure authentication as used by MSN. The lack of remote administration puts it at #4.

5. SpamRip - Anti-spam
SpamRIP works like CallerID for e-mail. Each time you call it, SpamRIP scans all your remote mail servers inbox and checks each email against your white and black lists, public Black Lists (like Spamcop), and your blacklisted countries. Each suspicious email is automatically flagged. Then you get to choose which ones are deleted and which ones aren’t.

The problem with this software is that there is a bit to much user interaction needed, and it only works with POP3 email account(so no Hotmail or Yahoo).

Good anti spam software is hard to find, but the top 5 is listed right here. I hope somebody finds good use of this.

The Elonta team - The visual start page

Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force a certain message on people who would not otherwise even think about it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes. Spam costs the sender very little to send, so there are many spam senders out there.

Email spam targets individual users with well… mail messages. Email spam lists are often created by scanning classified posting, stealing mailing lists, or just searching the Web for addresses. There is also another technique I have heard of; just simple guessing. For example, if you have and email like “katiexox@hotmail.com” you’ll be sure to get more spam than “apple9guy1@hotmail.com”.

The basic rules to minimize and maybe even avoid spam:

Well, thats it for now. Hope this has helped you in some way.

The Elonta team - The visual start page

Tired of spam in your Inbox? Well, here is something VERY useful I have found out and decided to share with you.

Here’s a scenario for you.

You’ve just made a new email account. You decided to sign up on SomeRandomWebsite.com, because it looks cool. You fill in your name and email address(which they swear upon their grandmother’s lives NEVER to divulge) and a few other details. Then you go to some other websites and do the same. Then a few days later you are getting email from organizations and people you never heard of, most of which are offering to give you Viagra? Who is sending you these emails?

Well, lets find out shall we?

All you need is a gmail account and some spare time. Don’t have a gmail account? Sign up here. Be sure to choose something easy for you to remember, like yourname@gmail.com.

Now, next time you sign up for something and have to provide an email address, you are going to have to use your gmail account. Only with a little “twist”.

We are going to use this little secret:

Say you want info on an offer by Jason, and Jason wants your name and email address so he can send it to you.

Well, great! Give him that email address(but your going to have to add something).
Say you made or have a gmail account called: givemespam@gmail.com

So what email address are you going to give ‘ol Jason?

givemespam+Jason@gmail.com

Now don’t panic. This is the secret part…when gmail sees the + sign in an email address, it ignores everything to the RIGHT of the plus sign(and the plus sign itself). So givemespam+Jason@gmail.com is treated in exactly the same way as givemespam@gmail.com. This is called Plus Addressing(a very good tutorial on this here)

That means if Jason decides to sell/give your email to ViagraForEveryone Inc(that dosen’t exist, I hope), and they send you an offer, you will know who gave your precious email away.

How? Well, just look at the top of your received messages, and it should say something like “ViagraForEveryone To givemespage+Jason@gmail.com”.

I’ll be sure to try and find out more tips like these, so check back! I hope you found this useful

The Elonta team - The visual startpage