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This email spam made me chuckle this morning:

Dear Friend, I am Mr. Francis White.I have a lucrative 13 Million USD Business proposal foryou, indicate your interest by sending me the following: 1. YOUR NAME2. YOUR RESIDENTIAL ADDRESS3. YOUR OCCUPATION4. YOUR PHONE NUMBER5. DATE OF BIRTH6. COUNTRY OF RESIDENCE Your response with the requested information should be sent to reach me at my personal email address below: franciswhite2@yahoo.gr I shall then provide you with more details on thistransaction when I hear from you. Sincerely,Mr.Francis White.

*******

Very simple email but man before offering me such a great deal, you think this person would already have some of this information?

You might be looking at this and thinking to yourself; “How stupid are people”; and I’ll tell you that that I really belive that they are playing on people’s greed or even a situation they are in.  Let’s say your desperate and you are on the verge of bankcruptcy and have just received this email.  It looks very tempting because you see a solution to your problems.  Sending them all of the requested information will allow them to play on you.  They are even hoping that you slip and give out more information to allow them to scam you.

While email is a wonderful invention, it allows us to keep in touch with family and friends for easily, quickly, and cheaply, it has one annoying feature – spam!  How many times have you had to weed through messages from a Nigerian prince wanted to give you money for helping him or emails about free $500 Best Buy gift certificates to get to the emails you really want to read?  Spam emails not only clog up the Internet airways, but may also cause you to miss an important email.  There are companies that provide spam filters, but most people find that that helps little, if at all.  What is the solution to getting rid of spam email?  SpamArrest!

SpamArrest allows you to take control of your inbox, deciding the mail that makes it to your inbox and the mail that doesn’t.  How does SpamArrest work?  First, when you sign up, you will receive a new email address that ends in spamarrest.com.  But do not worry; you do not have to give your family and friends a new email address.  You can simply forward your existing email accounts to the new SpamArrest account or have SpamArrest check them every so often for mail.  Anything that is not spam is placed in the SpamArrest inbox, which you can access using any POP3 or IMAP client, such as Outlook or Eudora. You can even use a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox to access your SpamArrest email account through their webmail system.

To keep the spam out of this new inbox, you tell SpamArrest what email to place in your inbox.  It can be a specific email address, a domain, or a mailing list if you subscribe to a forum.  You have access to a disposable email sub-address, which means you can receive messages from people you do not know without them having access to see your real email address.

When an unknown email comes into the SpamArrest system, it uses Challenge/Response technology to remove any spam.  If an email is received from someone not on your list, SpamArrest sends out an auto-reply message.  The person who sent the unknown email is then asked to click on a link, which takes them to a webpage where they are “challenged” to type in a word that is hidden within a graphic.  If this user successfully types in the hidden word, their message is sent to your inbox.  While this type of Challenge/Response technology is easy for people to do, it is almost impossible for spambots, the automated systems that send out spam at alarming rates, to complete.

If the person who sent the email does not verify it, it sits in your unverified folder for seven days.  You can log in and approve anyone you wish at any time during that seven-day period.  This means even if you have technologically challenged friends, you can still approve for their emails to enter your inbox.

Click here to see it in action.

SpamArrest is a quick and easy way to filter out unwanted spam email.  You can try it for free for 30 days.  If you decide to subscribe, rates start as low as $3.12 a month – a small price to pay for something that saves you time by deleting all the spam for you.  I stand by what is said here because I use it and would never go back.

Fighting spam seems to be a never-ending battle.  Like most illegitimate activities, it is going to take a lot to end it.  There are simple steps you as a user can do to help avoid it, but webmasters and email providers can also do their part to help.

Spammers are able to harvest email addresses from forums, blogs, and other activities you do online.  Their spambots take very little time and effort to obtain all these email addresses that they can then use to spam email accounts or sell to others.  They exert very little effort to be able to do this while most of us spend quite a bit of time either deleting spam or trying to figure out how to stop it.  If the cost of spammer’s job was raised, it might help put the ball in your court, rather than theirs. (more…)

It seems no matter what you do, your email account gets filled with spam emails.  You try to fight it, but it seems the spammers always find a way around your defenses.  But there are some almost effortless steps you can take to make their actions unsuccessful. (more…)

Email is a common way for viruses to infection your computer.  No matter how many warnings are issued to avoid opening emails from people they do not know, each day there are users that do just that and suffer the consequences.

One of the biggest problems with email viruses is that they don’t usually stop after infection one computer.  Many will access your address book without your knowledge and send the infected email to everyone on it, spreading the virus even further and further. (more…)

Everyone gets the spam emails – someone trying to give you a cheap mortgage rate, sell you some wonder diet drug, or entice you to join their new poker site.  Most of these are known as spam scams and all these places really wish to do is rip you off.

One of the best-known spam scams is the Nigerian Bank scam.  The person who originates the email introduces himself or herself as the wife or relative of a former dictator or some other government official.  They go on to a sad story about how there were millions of dollars deposited in a bank account, which they cannot get.  But, if you help them, they will be more than glad to give you a percentage of the funds.  The catch is they need you to transfer some money from your bank account for “expenses.”  Although this sounds like a scam, many people fall for it each year.  One elderly man from the Czech Republic lost his entire savings to such a scam.

There are other spam scams on the Internet that offer you investment opportunities.  They will say they are risk-free, but just remember – if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  All you will see is your hard earned money leave your bank account – never to return.  These scam artists are rarely caught because as soon as the money is transferred, they are gone. (more…)