Avoiding Scams, Hoaxes And Urban Legends

A popular subject within the internet today is about avoiding scams, hoaxes and urban legends. Allow me to share a couple of ways of avoiding some of the perils connected with being in touch with the rest of the world via the internet . As a general rule of thumb, watch out for any offer that sounds too good to be true, it usually is.. This is applicable to goods being offered on the Internet and especially to any unsolicited offer or spam you receive inside your email. Many of them are scams. The phrase "spam", just in case you do not know, refers to any unsolicited bulk email. If it isn't addressed to you, or you don't recognize the sender, or you are being asked to buy something or pass along questionable information, then that's spam. My advise would be to "can the spam" immediately by deleting any email you receive from anyone you do not recognize.

The perfect way of avoiding spam, is by being very wary about who you give your email address to. My advise here is to create 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 simply to delete any unwanted email. A trick that has been 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 majority of this is spam and can also be easily disposed of.

In addition to spams and scams, another thing to look out for on the Internet is hoaxes, urban legends and false information. You will find many of these floating around the Internet these days. Beware of any email that asks you to send money for some cause, or to forward the e-mail to your friends. Almost all of them are hoaxes. Another category of hoaxes involves virus warnings. If you receive information which indicates 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 much 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 of 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.

This article does not cover everything, but hopefully I have given you an insight in to what is involved. There are plenty of ebooks and such stuff on the internet. I always go to a company called Computer Repair London. They do not just repair computer systems, they also provide IT support as well and they are always helpfull if you get stuck on anything.