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Welcome back to the podcast! This week’s edition: Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam!
In the world of geek, there are few things more humorous than a sketch by the famous British comedy team Monty Python. One of my favorites is the Spam sketch, in which a man and his wife go out to breakfast and nearly every item on the menu contains Spam. Most items contain Spam multiple times, such as “Spam, bacon, sausage, and Spam.”
This may sound familiar, even if you’ve never seen the sketch. I’m sure you’re no stranger to being bombarded with spam in a different sense: in your e-mail. If you own an e-mail address, spammers have probably discovered it by now and have started flooding your Inbox with junk messages about replica watches, adult websites, and a wide array of pharmaceutical drugs.
Some of the more malicious spam messages include “phishing” techniques, which try to trick you into giving away personal information such as passwords into banking sites. It’s actually kind of sad to think that someone has so much free time to devote to so insidious a task. Why not use that time more productively, such as by volunteering at a local homeless shelter, or by playing Mario Kart on Nintendo Wii?
Most e-mail clients, including Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notus, provide tools to help you weed out and eliminate these junk messages. You can usually set up a filter that will automatically scan your incoming messages for certain words or phrases that are common in spam e-mail; those messages will get sent to a Junk E-mail folder so they’re not crowding your Inbox. You can sometimes even create a blacklist to block certain senders from getting spam to your Inbox.
In addition to these built-in features, there are other ways you can fight spam. For instance, it helps to be able to recognize when a message is actually just a sneaky attempt to fraudulently obtain your personal information.
So for the tips this week, there are some that show you how to use Outlook and Notes to block unwanted messages, along with some tips that will help you identify spam and phishing messages.
This week’s tips include:
- Does Your Inbox Have a Little Junk in the Trunk? – Configuring Outlook’s Junk E-mail options
- Rules to Rid Yourself of Rubbish – Using QuickRules in Lotus Notes to block junk mail
- Blocking and Junk – Blocking mail from specified senders in Outlook
- Keep it Out – Blocking mail from specified senders in Notes
- Spam Wars – What to do with messages that include “unsubscribe” links
- Forwarding and the Spam War – How to deal with forwarded chain letters in e-mail
The links for these tips can all be found on our blog at www.productiveUpodcast.com. If there are any topics you’d like to see covered in an upcoming edition, let us know in an iTunes review, or reach out to us via Twitter @productiveUcast.
That’s all for this week’s podcast. Until next week, just remember: you can’t have “egg, bacon, Spam, and sausage” without the Spam, but you can have an Inbox without spam. See you soon!
Music courtesy of Clayton & Fulcrum
