Block spammers and scammers
Nearly everyone who uses the Internet lists email as a primary reason for getting online, but when it comes to junk mail, electronic spam is more intrusive than the flyers that come rubber-banded to your doorknobs. That's because you, the Internet user, must pay for the bandwidth and disk space that spam takes up. Gobs of spam can also slow down your mail downloads. Even worse: once spammers know your email address, they can sell it to dozens more spammers. One of the most irritating spam letters we've ever seen is the message offering to sell us the names and email addresses of 5 million of our fellow spam victims for only US$40.
The spam scam
How do the spammers get your address in the first place? Most of them acquire their stock of addresses through harvesting, a process that uses software to scan Web sites for any text with an @ symbol, recording the addresses in databases. Then they send their own spam to these addresses and/or sell or trade the addresses to other spammers.
What's one of the best ways to keep spammers from tracking you down? Avoid using your primary address; instead, sign up for a free email account at a site such as Hotmail or Yahoo, then use these alternate addresses every time you post messages publicly or order products from Web stores. (For more antispam tips, check out our "Take back the Net" and "The great CNET spam-off" features.)
Spammers also harvest email addresses from posts you make to Usenet newsgroups and online archives of mailing lists you might subscribe to. Never enter your email address into your newsreader program's settings. It's easy for spammers to skim message boards for email addresses, so use a free email account to sign up for and reply to these. On those rare occasions when viruses send the contents of your address book to spammers, there's nothing you can do, so it's best to have antivirus software running all the time.
Keep a low profile
Of course, the easiest way to keep spam out of your in-box is to keep your email address private in the first place. Give it only to trusted friends, family, and colleagues. Don't enter your primary address into Web forms or shopping order pages, and don't enter your address into your Web or Usenet browser's preferences; some sites can read your email address or real name straight from the preferences. In general, when a Web browser or a Usenet newsreader asks you to enter your real name and/or email address in a settings dialog, just leave the fields blank and move on.
Once spammers get ahold of your email address, they can use HTML email messages to acquire additional addresses from you. HTML email looks different from plain-text email in that it can be formatted with different type sizes and live Web links right in the body of the message. Unfortunately, these messages not only take a long time to load, they can also contain hidden scripts that send the list of addresses in your address book to the composers of the messages. It's fairly easy to disable HTML email messages: simply go into your email program's preferences dialog and deselect the preference to view mail as HTML. (In later versions of Eudora, for example, you click Tools > Options, then select Viewing Mail in the left pane and uncheck the box labeled Use Microsoft's Viewer.)
Other tools, including AnalogX's free Script Defender can stop malicious code in your email before it activates. Script Defender, like CookieWall, runs in the background, waiting until it detects a malicious script. Then it stops the script from activating and lets you know what happened.
Encryption protection
Of course, even if you stick to all of these rules, email messages themselves aren't safe from prying eyes; anyone who intercepts messages between your PC and their destination can read them. Unless, that is, you encrypt, or scramble, the contents of the messages so that only you and the intended recipient can read them. You can use a free programs such as PGPfreeware to encrypt your mail, but both you and the recipient have to install and configure it ahead of time.
Some email clients offer encryption options, but they require that you acquire a digital ID from a third party. To encrypt messages within Outlook, for example, you must first subscribe to a company such as VeriSign for a yearly fee for an ID.
Best time for burglary?
Windows XP user might as well advertise the best times for burglars to come round their place.
But then again, if you have nothing to hide (because you do not have any property), then way worry about.