From the Webmaster
Over the years we've had numerous visitors to the website ask us for information that is really not pertinent to Circle Sanctuary but very pertinent to website surfing in general. This page is intended as an FAQ of sorts on handling some of the topics that we get asked about which are not Circle-specific but Internet technology specific.
Question: How can I reduce the spam I am getting? Webmaster: Here are 10 things you can do to reduce incoming spam:
1. Do not give your email address out to any website you don't trust to respect your request for privacy. If you ever find yourself filling in a form with your email address, a red flag should be going up in your mind about where that information is going and how it will be used. Do not assume that large corporations will respect your privacy--- the opposite is usually true. Contact the website staff or webmaster and ask if your privacy will be maintained (aka your email address will not be handed out to anyone) without your express permission before completing a form which requires it. Otherwise, you are begging for spam.
2. Do not sign up for adware, gameware, malware, or spyware at websites that offer anything for 'free' which requests your email address to get it. This is one of the oldest scams out there: to 'give something away' for the cost of your private information (addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc). Nothing is free if you're paying for it with your privacy. Ask yourself if that neat little game you'll be playing for the next week after you download it is really worth months of incoming spam.
3. Do not have your email address published as a link on any public website. This means it should not exist on any webpage where people can click on it and be taken to their email client. There are too many automated technologies available to spammers these days that can harvest those links by mass-surfing methods. This is why we don't link any email addresses on the Circle website!
4. Change out your email address when spam coming into it gets overwhelming. Notify everyone you write to regularly when you do to let them know the address change. Do not re-sign up for all the same websites you have in the past without first verifying that their privacy policies have not changed. In some cases they do change their policies. Yahoo Groups is a great example of this. In the beginning, Yahoo did not hand out email addresses when you used their Group services. If you read the fine print these days, it's quite a different situation and you are not getting Yahoo's services 'for free' anymore. You pay for it with advertisements on every thread page, having minimal control over the traffic you are generating on your groups, and Yahoo can do anything they want with any email address or information that gets put on their servers. Same with MSN. This is why we are gradually moving all Circle-related forums off Yahoo to our own servers this year.
5. Make sure other people do not publish your email address in their emails. Some folks are notorious for sending out jokes and such to all their friends, publicly including all the addresses they are sending the jokes to. While not meant to cause problems, it does. Big ones. Tell the senders to use BCC (blind carbon copy) mode when they do this so that email addresses are not published. If they are not willing to do this, ask them to remove you from their spam-encouraging lists.
6. Do not use unsubscribe webpages to unsubscribe yourself from spam lists. This is another tactic spam harvesters use to build their databases, not reduce them. When you use an unsubscribe page, what you are really doing is confirming for the spam harvesters that your email address is legit and legit information gets sold to even more spam database harvesters. Even those sites that actually do unsubscribe you are putting that email address to good use long after their list removes you. (And here you thought their unsubscribe facility was going to make your life easier!)
7. If you use ebay or any other megamart sites which require you to publish your email address, you have essentially asked to be spammed to death. Best recommendation: use a junk email address at the site which you don't care about getting rid of after a while (ex: hotmail, etc.) Don't use the email address you really care about for this sort of thing. Like a cell phone number, be smart about who you give it out to.
8. Clean your system regularly of address book-harvesting spyware, adware, malware, viruses, etc. By simply visiting websites, you infect your system and hand your personal information out to spam harvesters. There are some great free utilities you can use on a weekly basis to reduce the amount of spying that spammers do on your system when you drop in to visit their websites: we use Lavasoft's AdAware, Spybot Search & Destroy, and McAfee's Stinger which get updated on a weekly basis in some cases.
9. If you publish any papers, books, etc, make sure the publisher knows you do not want your email address publicly published. Visit their site to make sure they complied with your requests.
10. When you sign up with amazon, expedia, realaudio, adobe, etc or any other megasite, their account default settings usually screw your privacy from the get-go. They tell you (in the voluminous fine print that no one ever reads) that unless you say otherwise, they have complete authority to use your information however they wish, and that signup info winds up going out to all sorts of third party vendors (amazon and other sites make a lot of money this way). If the website you're creating an account for has a personal settings area, take the time to configure your account personal settings to remove yourself from third-party mailings, commercial notices, and any other "program" which authorizes the site to hand your information out to others without your express permission.
These are just some of the ways you can minimize spam at the email accounts you care about.
The Internet: where everything 'free' actually isn't.
