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Fighting Junk E-mail (aka Spam)

Junk e-mail (aka spam) is one of the biggest problems on the Internet. Almost everybody hates it. It fills up your mailbox, overloads your ISP impacting e-mail performance and more often than not, is nothing more than get rich quick schemes or pornographic advertisements. We've provided a tutorial to teach you about it and the following pages to help you fight it.

• Filtering your e-mail
• Joining the fight
• Spam fighting tools

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Filtering your e-mail

AT&T Worldnet Service has always provided information through its newsgroups and WURD on how to stop spam, and has also suggested software to help their members filter these messages. Now, they've deployed an E-Mail Screener to stop spam from even reaching your mailbox. You'll find information on how to sign up for the E-mail Screener on the following pages You'll also find information on what you should do with e-mail that isn't caught by the screener and e-mail that was caught in error.

• Spam Blocker FAQs

Some e-mail clients provide extensive e-mail filtering capabilities. We've provided instructions for filtering your e-mail into folders so it won't be mixed with your normal e-mail.

Filtering Junk Mail

• Entourage 2004 for the Macintosh
• Entourage X for the Macintosh
• Netscape 4.x
• Netscape 6/7
• OS X Mail Filters
• Outlook Express 4
• Outlook Express 5/6
• Outlook 2000/2002

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Joining the fight

Once you've put your junk e-mail in its own folder, you can start looking to see how it got to you. The header information can be used for this. The headers aren't normally viewed in a message, but you can get to them by following the instructions below. Select the e-mail program you use.

• AT&T Message Center
• Entourage X for the Macintosh
• Microsoft Outlook Express or Internet Mail
• Microsoft Outlook Express for the Macintosh
• Netscape
• Outlook 2000/2002

You'll find information on reading headers on the following pages:

• How To Find the Full Headers When Sending Complaints to an ISP
• Reading E-mail Headers

Once you determine the origin of the junk e-mail, you can forward the message to the ISP of the spammer and complain about it.

Note: If the SPAM got past the Brightmail E-mail Screener, you should take steps to alert the Brightmail system so that it can filter this kind of spam in the future. Instructions for doing this can be found at the AT&T Help site.

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Spam fighting tools

There are several tools available that will help you with your fight against junk e-mail. We've provided configuration information for the following.

• Configuring Sam Spade
• Configuring SpamKiller

If you don't want to download and install software, try the online tools at:

• SamSpade.org