For home users, access to the Internet is through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) like BT Internet, Pipex, Freeserve, Orange, Tiscali, or AOL. You may have a broadband or dialup connection and will pay a monthly subscription or pay as you go.
When you set up your ISP account you will be given a free email address.
It will look something like this “steve@virgin.net”
This email address is linked to your personal Internet mailbox. This box will store your emails until you go and look in the box using your password to retrieve and read your email.
There are two ways of looking in your mailbox to read the stored messages, “Webmail” where you go to your providers’ home page e.g. www.tiscali.co.uk and click on their Mail link. This method is useful if you are away from home and can use someone else’s computer to access the Internet. All you will need to know to look at your mail on screen is your email address and password.
The second method is to use an email program such as Outlook Express.
You will need quite a few more details to set up Outlook Express but your ISP will do this automatically or supply the details on their website.
Outlook Express provides a visual layout with all the elements you need to manage your email. There are folders to store incoming, sent, deleted emails and you can create folders to store emails by subject, eg holiday correspondence, email from a particular friend etc.
Sending an email is easy, click on the “Create a new email button” and fill in the address, subject and your message then send it. The message will be delivered to the address you typed.
If you misspelled the address the email server will be unable to deliver correctly and will send an “undelivered mail returned to sender” message to your inbox.
So far so good but Spam, the electronic version of junk mail will eventually land in your inbox.
Spam senders are always on the lookout for genuine email addresses and will collect them from any list they can. The cost of sending spam is very much lower than sending a postal junk mail shot so it is a cheap way of mass marketing. If a spammer discovers your address you can expect spam on a regular basis.
For this reason it may be worthwhile signing up to a Hotmail account. Hotmail is a free web mail service that will give you a free email address just by visiting hotmail.com and signing up. You can treat this as a non-permanent disposable email address that you can give out to certain sites who you do not want permanent contact with. You can dump the account if spam starts to arrive.
Spam is a big problem for businesses who advertise their email address on their website. Because the address is clearly visible it is easy to collect as a known genuine address to add to the spammers lists.
I know of a few heavily spammed business addresses that receive 10 genuine and 200 spam messages a day.
How do you combat this problem? Outlook Express has some very basic filters that can be used to eliminate messages containing certain words (look in tools / message rules / mail) and compile a list of words like Viagra, mortgage, loan, rolex watch etc but if this becomes a big problem you will need an anti spam program. “Mailwasher” from www.mailwasher.net is worth a look and it’s free for non-commercial use. “Spamjab” is a subscription service £60 per year, useful if you are a business with a big spam problem.
It gets worse, what if the spammers could get you to send their spam for them? It would save them the bother. The bad news is they can! A botnet is a small rogue program that infects your machine and then sends thousands of spam messages from your machine in your name using your address.
The only indication you may get is “returned undelivered” messages in your inbox for emails you didn’t think you sent.
Anti spyware and antivirus software is your only hope if you have picked up a Trojan or botnet but most can be hunted down and eliminated from your machine even using inexpensive or free programs (Ad Aware, Spybot, AVG Antivirus and the Symantec free online scanner (for broadband users only))
By the way make sure you get the genuine “Ad Aware SE Personal”, from the lavasoft site, there are some similar sounding products that appear at the top of a google search for AdAware that are not the genuine program.
It gets worse, what if the spammers could send from your account without the bother of putting a botnet or Trojan on your machine? You guessed it; the bad news is they can!
If they can get a program onto your machine that can lift your details and password they can setup an account that looks like you send spam. Again the only indication would be “returned undelivered” emails Try changing your password on your ISP’s home page.
I’ve painted a grim picture and a worst case scenario that most people will not encounter but the email system is struggling with a lot of problems of this type at the moment and ISP’s are only just taking serious action to combat the problem.