Are Filters Important? Ask Sarah Palin

Spam comes at us from many directions. It is estimated that on any given day 88% to 98% of emails sent across the internets are spam or virus laden. That begs the question, how good are your filters? Do you get 1 bad email a day? an hour? a week? Or has email become such a wasteland of spam that you no longer bother to read it and go directly to instant messaging or Facebook and Twitter. It looks to me like Sarah Palin needs to check her filters, as no "Flapper" should have ever let that kind of call thru. (a Flapper being the human equivalent of a filter.)

As Sarah found out, it is a good idea to check your filter regularly. Like your car, not just to see what has been caught, but also to decide if too much junk is getting thru.

Here at Webconsuls we use GMail for our domain email. Today I bet Palin wishes Google had a service that could filter her calls, perhaps when Grand Central comes outa beta.
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ALERT! Quechup steals your address book!

Did you get an invite to Quechup? DELETE IT!!! Just wanted to send a note out to everyone to let them be aware of a new social network that is spamming everyone in your gmail address book. If you get an invite from Quechup ignore it. I sign up for these sites all the time. I was sent an invitation from a customer and joined to check it out. When Quechup asked me to invite my friends I did, making sure only to invite Lisa McClure. However, everyone in my gmail address book was sent an invitation. The amount of bad press that can be found with a Google search on Quechup is amazing. Please disregard, trash, destroy, delete, remove, any and all invites from Quechup. and advise your friends to do the same. From now on I will google every invite I get prior to joining any new site. We advise you to do the same. and to contact us directly if you have any questions.

Protect Yourself and Your Computer

Conscientious web users need to protect themselves from spam scams that can waste their time, steal personal information, and turn their computers into "zombies" spewing more spam throughout the Internet.

Spam methods change quickly and what was popular last month may be outdated next month. A popular one today is "greeting card spam" when someone you do not know sends you an e-greeting card. To read it you have to download a special program which could contain code would compromise your system. An insidious version of this spam scam is to use information on the web, such as at MySpace.com, to find your friends and use their name to send the card. Be very careful before downloading any program.

Stock market "pump and dump" schemes are also popular today. A spammer will buy a penny stock and then send millions of emails "pumping" the stock. If only a few people buy the stock then it will go up and the spammer will "dump" and take a profit. If you get unsolicited information that seems too good to be true, then it probably is.

To protect yourself you use up up to date anti-virus software that has the latest virus information. You should avoid clicking on links in emails but rather type in the complete URL since what you see in the email may not be where you end up. Keep your financial and other confidential information on a flash drive and only connect it when you need to access the information. Do not fall for schemes. Use common sense.