Top Five Things Spammers Want You to Do

Sam the Spammer is hoping you will bail him out. In November, a San Jose server farm that specialized in hosting spammers was shut down. Worldwide spam almost instantaneously dropped 70%. Now Sam is struggling to get back into business. Here’s how taxpayers/Internet users everywhere can help him:

• When you visit a website you know little about, definitely register using your main e-mail address. Do not even consider establishing a spare Yahoo or Gmail mail account specifically for this purpose, and abandoning it once you start getting too much spam.
• Leave the “show image” option turned on in your e-mail program, even though it only takes just a few clicks to disable it. That way, Sam can use his cool image tracking tool to determine if your account is active and send you additional spam.
• Post your e-mail address publicly wherever you can. Blogs, forums, and social networking sites are all great because Sam has a bot designed especially to troll those locations and capture e-mail addresses for his list.
• When you get an e-mail that promises to reduce your mortgage rate to 0% or increase the size of you-know-what, please click unsubscribe. That way, Sam knows you are reading his e-mails and he can send you more.
• If you run a business, do not contact Networkistics to help you figure out the best combination of hardware, software, and services to eliminate spam. Sam just grins when he knows he is wasting your employees’ time as well as yours.

We may have to bail out every other industry in the nation, but let’s not bail out Sam and all the other spammers.

Wishing you a spam-free 2009!

Darrell Gray
Networkistics, Inc.
IT consulting and support services
925.249.9980
www.networkistics.com