Controlling Spam

Spam: the unsolicited e-mail you receive more often than not. It’s usually commercial advertising and frequently for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or illegal services. aaNet does not sell or disclose your email address to any third parties.

Your best defense is to be very, very careful about giving out your email address – especially online.

How do spammers get my email address?

Spambots are programs which crawl the web and scour newsgroups and websites to harvest email addresses.

Those who control their own webserver may wish to actively redirect spambots. Web page authors may wish to hide their mailto links using HTML-level techniques. End users can manually "munge" their email address if they use it in a public place, to make it harder for a spambot to pick it up.

Newsgroups and lists

Whenever you post a message to a newsgroup or chat site, your email address is automatically attached to your post. (You need to specifically configure your newsreader program to stop it from doing this.)

It is easy for spammers to harvest the email addresses form from the tens of thousands of usenet messages posted every day.

It is also possible, although not as easy, for spammers to harvest email addresses from discussion groups and lists.

Spammers now have sophisticated and powerful computer programs that sift through thousands of newsgroups every day, to extract the email addresses from them.

Chat services 

If you’ve ever registered with a chat service (like IRC) and entered your email address in the personal information area, you may be displaying your address every time you use the service. It’s easy for spammers to capture your address from this source.

Online contests and surveys 

If you’ve ever entered an online contest or survey that required you to submit your email address, your address may have ended up with a spammer. In fact, capturing email addresses is the only reason that many online contests and surveys exist.

Viruses 

Once they have infected your computer, some Trojan and other viruses will send your email address to another computer. The owner may either be a spammer, or will sell the captured addresses to spammers.

Other spammers 

Once a spammer has your email address, there’s a good chance of them selling it to other spammers

Who should have your email address?

A good rule of thumb is to only give your personal email address to those that you would not mind giving your house address.

But I need to email other People?

If the person you wish to email does not come into the "house address" category, create another email address specifically for this purpose. Just check the email box when you are waiting for something in particular and use your webmail access to pick it up. It is not a good idea to have your mail program automatically receive these emails from this box and that way you will prevent spam reaching your computer.

Why doesn’t aaNet offer SPAM filtering?

The best form of defense is to educate yourself; if you read this document you should have little trouble avoiding spam. Due to the fact that spam filtering is unreliable we do not offer it. aaNet realizes spam filtering looks like a good option but technically it cannot be done without risking deleting genuine email. With a few tips most SPAM is easily controlled.

What we do instead is offer you several email addresses and suggest that you keep at least one that you never ever enter on the internet. This will ensure that only people that are supposed to have your address will have it and you will not receive spam. If by some unfortunate circumstance you do accidentally enter your protected email address where spammers can get hold of it, we have given you the ability to delete and recreate an email in a different but similar name so again you will not receive spam.

I think I have spam but I need to open the attachment to make sure?

Don’t do is this, viruses are sent this way; if you do not know who it is from do not be curious, just delete it or save it until you find out who it is from. This is how most viruses and Trojan Horses are transferred.

On another point, never open a hyperlink from your email program.. NEVER.

If you get an email from your bank or another institution that deals with sensitive information and you feel you must visit their website, then open your browser and manually type in the URL address you wish to go to. This way you will not get caught.

Isn’t SPAM illegal?

Yes it is most definitely illegal in Australia and information on legalities can be obtained from the Australian Communications Authority

http://www.aca.gov.au/consumer_info/spam/

What happens if I SPAM from my aaNet connection?

Not everyone that spams is a spammer and some spam can be generated by viruses on someone’s computer.

If you are found to be spamming from the aaNet network your connection will be disabled immediately and you will be notified. Then your spam mail will be investigated by the ACA. If it is found to be a virus you will be asked to fix the problem. If it is the opinion of the ACA that you are guilty of a SPAM attack then you will be disconnected by Telstra and charged an early disconnection fee if you are still under contract.

Unfortunately there is no second chance.