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Email Safety Tips

Tackle Spam and Don't Miss Valuable Email by SoftwareGuru 8th July 2009 No matter which email software you use, there is always the possibility of an important email going straight into the junk mail section and being deleted by accident. Email filters and anti-spam technology has improved in recent years but there are still steps which we would recommend to prevent valuable emails from being lost. This is especially the case for any newsletters that you may have signed up to such as Software4Students. The following graphics of the most popular email programs clearly show what actions need to be taken. If you are unfamiliar with the idea of having a 'safe sender' list, then now is the time to learn! AOL Mail AOL 9.0 VR Gmail/Google Mail Hotmail Apple Mac Mail Outlook 2003 Outlook 2007 Outlook Express Yahoo! Mail Windows Mail Follow these instructions and make sure that from now on, any email you receive that you wish to protect from your junk filters will appear in your inbox. Likewise, if spam is turning up in your inbox, don't just delete it. First, mark it as spam so that your email software knows to filter it in future. Receiving Spam From Your Own Email Address Recently, it came to my attention that it is possible to receive spam from what appears to be your own email address. Having contacted both Yahoo! and Zen Internet Hosting about this issue, I received the following information from the latter's excellent customer support. It makes for interesting reading. Receiving spam email from your own email address is not uncommon, nor is it an indication that your email accounts have been hijacked. In fact this occurrence is due to the way the email medium is set up. When you set up an email account in any email program, such as Outlook, it will at some point ask for your email address. This is not so that it can collect your emails, but so that it can sign all emails you send with a "from" address. Unfortunately there is no way for an email client like Outlook to verify whether the address you enter is in fact one that you have purchased. There is nothing to prevent someone from configuring an email account to send email using any email address they like. Spammers are the culprit in almost all cases of people receiving emails from their own addresses, the reason is that it will help to hide the identity of the spammer, who will never use any domains that they own themselves, and will also lend a degree of legitimacy to the spam when others receive it, especially if they receive a lot of email from that address. There is unfortunately nothing that can be done to prevent this behaviour, although there are a few measures that you can take that will help to reduce the impact of these fake addressed emails. One measure is to add a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record to the DNS records for your domain which will contain the IP addresses of mail servers that are permitted to send email from that domain. Some, but not all, mailservers on the Internet will check this record and compare the sending IP address to those on the SPF record, if they don't match then the mail will be rejected. However this method is not ubiquitous on the Internet and is prone to finding false positives which will impede legitimate email. Another method worth investigating which works on a similar principle is using Domain Keys but again support is not widespread and is not 100% efficient.

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