How do I stop Junk E-Mail (SPAM)?

1. What is Spam

Spam is the electronic version of Junk Mail. Unlike your normal junk mail, spam usually contains bogus offers, illegal material and scams.

2. Where does spam come from?

Anyone can send spam. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products or get-rich-quick schemes.

3. How do they have access to my  e-mail address?

IDL Internet does not sell or otherwise disclose its users’ email addresses to third parties.

There are a number of ways that "Spammer's" can get your e-mail addresses.

• If you have ever used news groups your e-mail address is automatically inserted in your message, available to anyone who reads it.

• Is your e-mail address displayed on ANY Internet website or chat board. Spammers write programs to harvest these addresses.

• If you have ever used a chat program and entered your e-mail address into it. For Example if you ever use ICQ (a very popular instant messenger) your e-mail address is available to anyone who looks at your details.

• Viruses- if you or one of your contacts receive a virus your e-mail address and all your contacts will be e-mailed to random people. Some of these recipients can include Spammer's.

• Guessing, with the amount of people on-line the odds are in the Spammer's favour. Spammer's usually favour common surnames and first names. If the first part of your e-mail address can be found in the dictionary or a name book then you will be a common target.

4. Why is Spam so hard to stop?

Spammer's are constantly changing e-mail addresses, using bogus e-mail address and using different Internet providers to send it from which makes it very difficult to stop and to tell the difference between Spam and legitimate e-mail.

5. How do I stop receiving Spam??

As you can see from point 3 it is hard to stop it if they are just guessing your e-mail address, but spam can be reduced or even stopped in one of two ways :- 

1. Turn on spam assassin. This is a automatic filtering service that IDL provide for free. It compares every e-mail you receive with a database of know spam and looking for key works like "Get Rich Quick" it intelligently decides if the message is spam. Once a spam is detected we put the words "***SPAM***" in the subject to make it easy for you to automatically delete them.
Please visit the following page for instructions on this http://home.idl.com.au/?go=Online.Helpdesk&id=607

2. Change your e-mail address to something they can't guess. This isn't as difficult as you might think (unless of course it is used by a business with many clients). Give our helpdesk a call so we can change your address and change your e-mail settings. Then e-mail everyone in your address book about your new address. Because the old address is no longer valid your friends that send to it will receive a bounce telling them the address is incorrect and they can either contact you by another means or send to the new address.