Spam refers to unsolicited advertising e-mails that are sent to recipients. Some rules on how to deal with e-mails on an everyday basis help to reduce and fight spam.
Be very careful when dealing with spam e-mails
- Remain passive; if in doubt, delete e-mails with suspicious subject lines.
- You should even be cautious if you receive e-mails from senders you
know (sender e-mail addresses can easily be faked).
- Never open attachments of suspicious e-mails to avoid the risk of activating a potential virus or Trojan.
- Do not reply to suspicious e-mails because this confirms your address as correct and it may subsequently be sold on. The same applies to “Unsubscribe” or “Remove me” as well as links which pretend that your address is deleted from a distribution list.
- Create a second e-mail address for any e-mail correspondence with people you are not familiar with. Only give your second e-mail address to strangers and use it in guest books, forums, etc.
- If you have a very common first and last name, you can add numbers to your e-mail address.
- Try not to use an e-mail address that consists of just three letters (e.g. firstname.lastname@example.org).
- When sending e-mails to several recipients, use distribution lists or enter the recipients in the “BCC” field.
- Do not publish your e-mail address openly on your website. Use [at]bluewin.ch instead or create a contact form.
- Use the spam filter for all your Bluewin e-mail address (or those of other providers). If no filter is available, install appropriate software on your computer.
- Users of Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) benefit from a further spam and phishing filter in their Outlook e-mail programme.
- Use the “Report spam” function when using Webmail.