What is SPAM? SPAM is any email that
contains an advertisement that you did not request. If you
book a fight online and provide your email address so the
airline can email your confirmation, and the airline includes in
that confirmation unsolicited advertisements about some special
they are promoting, that is SPAM because the confirmation email
contains unsolicited advertisements that you did not request.
The airline should ask your permission to include their
advertisements in their confirmation email and if they fail to
do so, then they are SPAMMING you.
If you have a free email address and each
time you send an email to a friend, the free email address
provider inserts advertisements in your email, then you are a
SPAMMER after all your friend may desire to receive your email,
but they don't especially desire to know you are a cheap skate
who is paying for your free email service by sending SPAM
advertisements to your friends. (Bet you haven't thought
about it from that point of view.)
These are just a few reasons why we have
so much SPAM on the Internet. Many Internet users are
willing victims who not only aid SPAMMERS but encourage SPAM.
Spam is the number one problem on the Internet. It costs
everyone money, time, and wasted resources. For
Internet Service Providers SPAMMERS are stealing resources by
putting huge burdens on bandwidth, mail servers, and tech
support. Those costs are passed on to the consumers so
SPAMMERS are stealing money for the pockets of everyone who uses
the Internet. Think of a SPAMMER as someone who sends you
junk paper mail to your mailbox and your mail carrier forces you
to pay the postage on that unwanted junk mail.
SPAMMERS do not pay for the bandwidth and resources they steal
from ISPs who provide bandwidth and resources for their
subscribers and as in all businesses which an ISP certainly is,
in order for a business to stay in business someone must pay the
expenses, so the consumer gets to pay in the form of higher
Internet fees. The NET Connection, Inc uses several
methods to try to reduce the level of SPAM that comes into our
network, but there are some things that you can do as well.
- Never buy anything from an
unsolicited email. Even if it comes from someone you
do business with. The reason we have so much SPAM is
because believe it or not SPAMMERS are making money because
there are some people who are buying products and services
from the unsolicited emails they send out.
- Demand that companies like airlines
remove their unsolicited ads from the emails that you want
to receive. You are their customer and if you take a
zero tolerance policy towards the unsolicited ads these
companies include in their emails to you they will meet your
demands. An emailed airline confirmation should not
contain unsolicited advertisements. It should contain
your confirmation information. By including
unsolicited advertisements in valid emails it becomes more
difficult for SPAM filters to know a valid airline
confirmation from an unsolicited SPAM.
These actions makes SPAM filters less accurate resulting in
either more SPAM coming into your email account or a greater
possibility that valid email may get blocked as suspect SPAM
and it increases the costs of your Internet because ISPs
must hire more tech support personnel to deal with blocked
emails because they contain SPAM. Force the companies
you do business with to clean up their business
communications by removing unsolicited advertisements from
their emails to you.
- Don't use free email accounts that
put advertisements in the emails that you send, you are only
contributing to the bank accounts of SPAMMERS. Even if
the advertisement they include is to promote their free
email service, it still is a no no because it creates
problems for ISPs who are trying to filter out SPAM.
To a SPAM filter an ad in an email for a free email provider
looks no different than an add to sell something.
-
http://www.cloudmark.com sells in my opinion a very good
anti-SPAM program called SPAM-NET that will interface with
Outlook or Outlook Express. It will move suspected
SPAM to a SPAM folder within your Outlook for your review or
you can set it to delete suspect SPAM it. If an
email that you believe is SPAM does get past the filter, you
can tag it as SPAM and SPAM-NET notifies its global servers.
If enough SPAM-NET users get the same email and tag it as
SPAM then the SPAM-NET server will add that email to is
blacklist. Your SPAM-NET software will do lookups on
the SPAM-NET global servers so it can change its SPAM
detection routine based upon what the SPAM-NET global
servers report.
Spyware
When you surf the web, some websites will
silently download little programs to your computer that can
gather information about you from your computer along with your
Internet activities. Sometimes these programs will damage
your operating system and cause it to slow or some functions to
fail. These little hidden programs are called
Spyware and you should protect your computer from them.
There are several Anti-Spyware softwares available to remove
Spyware from you computer and protect it from future attacks.
One of the most popular is
Spy Sweeper by Webroot. You can download and try this
product for a limited time for free or purchase it directly from
their website. You should have an Anti-Spyware software
like Spy Sweeper running on your computer and up to date.
Popups
Don't you just love those Popup ads?
It is hard to believe that these make money but they must, even
companies like CNN.com uses them. The good news is there is a
very good free software that will block almost all these ads.
It is EMS Free Surfer mk II and it can be downloaded at:
http://www.kolumbus.fi/eero.muhonen/FS/Download.htm .
The download link is located about center of the page and it is
titled
EMS
Free Surfer mk II v. 2.1.026, multilanguage .
Web bugs
I know
what you are asking. What the heck is a Web bug?
Many websites want to know more about you than you desire them
to know. Because of the way the Internet works, when you
visits websites they can ask your computer certain questions and
then they sell your information to online advertising networks.
This is another way for SPAMMERS to learn your email address and
your interests. There is a free software called Bugnosis
that can be downloaded from
http://www.bugnosis.org but this software isn't for everyone
because while it will report to you the web bugs in the websites
that you visit, it doesn't really protect from those bugs.
There are three ways you can protect your computer from web
bugs.
-
Subscribe to our Proxyconn Web Accelerator service, or
-
Purchase and install a software like Anonymizer
available from
http://www.anonymizer.com, or
-
Use our ISA server which is free (not for Proxyconn
users).
Our
ISA server can be used by anyone who connects inside our
network. If you use our dialup service or DSL service
you can use our ISA server. If you use our DSL service
at home but at work your employer uses some other ISP and
you move your notebook from home to work and back, then our
ISA server will only work for you at home, it will not
provide access outside our network.
Using
our ISA server is easy.
-
Open your Internet Explorer (if you have to ask what
Internet Explore then this may not be for you.)
-
From the Tool menu select Internet Options,
-
From Internet Options select Connections,
-
Depending on how you connect will determine where you go
from here.
-
Dialup connections will select
their dialup connection then click on the setting
button to the right.
-
DSL users will select the LAN
button located near the bottom right.
-
If Automatically Detect Settings isn't check, check it
then move then the Proxy Server section.
-
Click to use Proxy Server and enter isa.arkansasusa.net
in the Address field. Add 8080 in the Port field.
Put a check mark in Buy Pass Proxy server for local
addresses. Click on OK and then Apply and OK and
you are done.
Proxyconn uses an ISA server to accelerate your webpage
access. We also provide free access to our ISA server
which doesn't provide webpage acceleration at the speed of
Proxyconn but both protects your computer from Web bugs and
some Spyware because your computer never visits websites.
The roll of an ISA server is to visit the websites for you
so you are always getting the pages from the ISA server and
not directly from the websites. Web bugs can only
report the ISA servers information and doesn't see your
workstation. If you use Proxyconn, changing to use our
ISA server will disable your Proxyconn which is not
recommended. If you use our network in some locations
and another ISPs network in other locations Proxyconn will
work in both locations and may be your better choice.
Proxyconn is a monthly subscription service. If you
want to know more about Proxyconn visit
http://arkansasusa.com/proxyconn.html .
Firewalls
A
firewall protects your computer from outside access but
firewalls do require some knowledge that many Internet users
may not have. Most users do not know that Outlook uses
port 25 to send email and port 110 to download email.
They don't know that Internet Explorer uses port 80 and port
443 yet for a firewall to properly protect your computer
some knowledge is required in order to know how to properly
install and maintain the protection that a firewall can
give. Windows XP Service Pack 2 comes with a free
firewall. We like Sygate which is a free
firewall that can be downloaded at
http://smb.sygate.com/products/spf_standard.htm
Sygate will work on 95/98/ME NT/2000 and 2003. It
monitors the actually programs that run on your computer and
notifies you when a program tries to communicate outside
your computer. For example Internet Explorer uses port
80 and 443 to when you surf the Internet. You can set
Sygate to always allow IE to use port 80 and 443 or to
notify you when it does or to block access to those ports by
that program all together. The advantage is you can
set Sygate to allow the programs that you want to
communicate and run on your computer and if something sneaks
by like a new Trojan virus in an email, when that program
tries to communicate, Sygate will notify you and will block
that communication unless you tell it to allow it.
As you can image, firewalls are not as easy as some would
suggest but they will protect your computer from many
dangers.
Viruses
Viruses are most misunderstood programs on the Internet.
They are programs that someone wrote and most are designed
to cause frustration, some are designed to break other
programs that you use, and some are designed to scan you
computer for information then transport that information by
the Internet to servers where the information may be used
for criminal purposes. Next to SPAM viruses steal a
lot of money and resources in the form of lost productivity
that occurs when users are deny the use of their computers.
So
how do we defend against viruses? Certainly there are
many companies that sell Anti-Virus software but most
computer users do not understand that purchasing and
installing an Anti-Virus software is just half the battle.
Because Viruses are programs, Anti-Viruses softwares must be
updated daily in order to identify new Virus programs that
are released almost daily. Just installing an
Anti-Virus software will not protect your computer from
future viruses anymore than having a flue shot in 2000 will
protect your body from the flue in 2005. Users should
learn how to update their Anti-Virus softwares or hire a
computer professional to install and configure their
Anti-Virus software. What pay thousands of dollars for
a computer, software, add an Internet connection, and leave
it to chance.
The
NET Connection scans emails for viruses and we block certain
ports on our network to prevent certain kinds of viruses
from spreading but we can catch and block only about 95%.
There are new viruses that are created and released almost
daily and it takes sometimes 24 hours or more for most
Anti-Viruses softwares makers to learn of a new virus
and create a new signature file for download which will
enable their Anti-Virus softwares to recognize these new
Viruses and block them. During that time new viruses
could be attached to your email, so what do you do?
We
recommend never open any unexpected email attachments.
Because of the way virus infected computers work, most virus
infected emails will come from a friend or family members
email address and if you open the attachment thinking that
your friend or family member would not send something that
is unsafe, your computer may become infected. Always
check first. Send an email back to the person who sent
it to you and ask them what the attachment is. It may
be a harmless picture of the new baby but it may also be a
viruses that your friend or family member's computer is
sending to you without their knowledge.
We
are often asked what Anti-Virus soft do we use. We use
F-prot available at
http://f-prot.com. This software is very
inexpensive and in our opinion works as well if not better
than many of the better known brands.
disclaimer - The NET Connection,
Inc. makes the above information available on a user beware
policy. Use the information at your own risk.
None of the programs we have listed are created or owned by
our company and while we believe they are safe to use, there
may be conflict issue so other softwares that we are not
aware of or your experience using the softwares may be
different from ours. If you are not willing to accept
responsibility for the use of any software we have
recommended, DO NOT USE IT.
Fayetteville 442-2780 
