[Chris W]

Originally Posted by stevenick

Hello,

Junk Mail, Spam & Pop Ups are driving me mad!!
It's that bad I am thinking of getting rid of my PC and the Internet altogether.
Do others feel the same way as me?

Steve

The problem is that you are not educated in how to protect yourself from the things which are now so common on the internet.

First of all Junk mail (aka spam):

• Be very careful which websites you put your email address in- some are just harvesting addresses for spam. Other companies sell addresses and then you get spammed. If you are in any doubt whether you should enter your address, read the privacy section of the site. If there isn't one; steer well clear.
• If you do receive spam, do NOT use the "unsubscribe" option, as this will just verify your address to the spammer, and more spam will soon arrive
• In your email client, set it up to view messages as plain text, or if you use outlook/ outlook express, turn off the preview pane.
• Install a spam filtering program, mailwasher has been recommended to me, but there are many threads on here with other options, do a seach for "spam filter" and you will find the results. Mailwasher is available to download from here
• If you are completely overrun with spam, considering changing your email address, or setting up an additional one to use for your friends/ important emails, and if you need to fill in webforms with your address, use the old one.

Pop ups:

• There are two different types of popups- those caused by websites that you have visited and those which will occur even when you don't have a browser window open. There are caused by different things, and i will explain each below...

Browser Pop ups:

• browser popups come from websites that you are visiting, normally advertising and there are two easy way of combating these that i would recommend:

1. If you use internet explorer install the google toolbar available here. This automatically blocks popups from sites, and has a button which you can click if you need to allow popups from a particular site (eg your internet bank).
2. 2. Considering using an alternative browser- I use Mozilla Firefox which has an inbuilt popup blocker, which again can be set to allow popups from particular sites

Other popups:

• Other popups are caused by spyware or adware infecting your computer. These things are similar to viruses, but may do things such as track your usage, give popups or change your homepage. There are several programs that you can use to combat this.

1. Adaware from here Install the program, open it, check for updates and run a full system scan
2. Spyware Blaster available from here this will run in the background and prevent the spyware from getting on your pc in the first place.
3. Spybot S & D available from www.download.com - similar to adaware but it may find some things that adaware doesn't, and conversely, adaware may find things that spybot doesn't

General Advise:

• I cannot emphasise this enough... you MUST make sure that you have upto date firewall and antivirus software running on your pc, and that windows is patched with the latest updates

1. Try a search here for free firewall software, or have a look at this for information about Zone Alarm
2. For antivirus, try AVG from here but make sure that you run regularly (preferable daily) updates. An antivirus program that is not upto date is useless.
3. Check for windows updates from here

Once you have done that... post back... i will bet you a fiver that 98% of your spam and popups will have dissappeared.

MB