Articles | Avoid Scams, Hoaxes And Urban Legends

A very popular subject on the world wide web nowadays is about avoiding scams, hoaxes and urban legends. Below are a couple of ways to avoid some of the perils associated with being in touch with the rest of the world via the internet . As a general guideline , beware of any offer that sounds too good to be true, it usually is.. This is applicable to products being offered on the Internet and especially to any unsolicited offer or spam you receive inside your email. Many of these are scams. The term "spam", just in case you do not know, refers to any unsolicited bulk email. If it isn't addressed to you personally, or you do not recognize the sender, or you are being asked to buy something or pass along questionable information, then this is spam. My advise is to "can the spam" immediately by deleting any email you receive from anyone you do not recognize.

The perfect way of avoiding spam, is to be very careful about who you give your email address to. My advise here is to set up a free email account so that you can give this email address to anyone you do not absolutely trust with all of your individual information. It almost never does any good to fight back against spam. Your best plan is just to delete any unwanted email. A trick that continues to be pretty successful for me is to set up an email rule (or filter) that automatically sends any mail not addressed to me straight to a special folder. The vast majority of this is spam and can be easily disposed of.

Along with spams and scams, another thing to watch out for on the Internet is hoaxes, urban legends and false information. There are most of these floating all around the Internet these days. Watch out for any email that asks you to send money for any cause, or to forward the email to your friends. Virtually all of these are hoaxes. Another category of hoaxes involves virus warnings. If you receive information that suggests it is possible to get a computer virus from doing anything except opening an email attachment or running an application, then this also is almost certainly false information.

Most computer viruses are spread by users opening email attachments that contain the virus. You should never open an eMail attachment unless you are expecting one. Even if you know the sender, ensure the attachment is legitimate before opening it. It is a lot safer to delete any questionable attachments and ask the sender to resend them than to assume the sender intended to send that email.

Your best defenses against computer viruses are:
1) Caution in downloading programs from questionable sources.
2) Regularly scanning your drive with virus protection software.
3) Backing up all your important data to a different drive or media (floppy, Zip or CD-ROM) as regularly as possible. By doing all of these, if your system does get infected, you can restore it with a minimum of fuss.