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If you find a dead link, a typo or have a suggestion, there's a link at the bottom of the page that you can use to send me an Email. 		I like and use Firefox. Which ever browser you use, make sure you keep it updated. That goes for all critical software.

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Information Page Index

green dot Phone & Address Listings green dot Search Engines green dot Dictionaries and Encyclopedias green dot Maps & Other Information Sources green dot Health Information green dot Government Stuff green dot HTML green dot Investment green dot News green dot Traffic & Weather green dot Spam Prevention and Tracking green dot Privacy on the Internet green dot Urban Legends, Virus Hoaxes & related Stuff


If it's related to computers and you can't find it here, try the List of Lists.



This doesn't fit anywhere in particular, because it covers almost everything. This is a site that has at least most of the FAQs on the Internet. Got a question about something? Check the FAQs. It's amazing what kinds of things people will write up a FAQ on. Be prepared to spend some time. Added 6/27/00

Phone & Address Listings

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Search Engines

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Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

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Maps & Other Information Sources

Links in this section verified July 21, 2005

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Health Sites

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Government

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HTML Stuff

I haven't read every page linked here, this is my "To Do" list, so I know there's things I need to fix on my own pages. Telling me about blatant errors would be appreciated though.

Information

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Investments

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News

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Traffic & Weather

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SPAM



The spam section consists of some spam prevention stuff, and some spam fighting links.

Spam Prevention

The best way to handle Spam is to not get it in the first place. Once you get on the spammers lists, it's pretty much impossible to get away from it. For an example of how spam snowballs, see this writeup on what happens when a false address (probably by mistake in this case) was registered on a web page,and it turned out that that address was actually collected by someone else. It's a depressing example of what can happen once your email address gets Out There.

One of the most effective things to do is to limit who has access to your real email address. There are sites like Sneakemail and Spamgourmet.com that will give you an unlimited number of email addresses and forward messages that are sent to those addresses to one you specify. That way you can give a specific address to each company that asks for a registration email address, and track if they sell or trade it. Sneakemail does not provide standard mail servers that you can use to send and receive email.

There's a long list of how spammers get email addresses at Uri Raz's page.

Never respond to any spam, no matter how legitimate the "Remove Me" offer looks. And be aware that just reading spam can validate your address in some cases, depending on your email client and your security settings. Always read spam as plain text, and if possible, use a firewall to block your email program from using anything except the standard ports for email. And never, ever, under any circumstances support a spammer by buying anything advertised by spam. If you get a spam offering a product from a legitimate company (as opposed to a Chinese drug store) feel free to contact them and tell them what you think. And that you will never buy their product again.

You can also get free usable email addresses from sites like MyRealBox. Use those for everyday use and save your ISP address for your most trusted and important contacts. MyRealBox and others like them have mail servers that you can access from your regular email program. EmailAddresses.com has lists and reviews of Free and For Free email providers as well as Free ISPs. There's also an article reviewing some free email services at Lowendmac.com.

There lots of information about Mail and News at ii.com, including a section listing IMAP service providers and detailing the options they have for spam filtering. Added 06/20/03

Read the Privacy policy of anyone you sign up with. You shouldn't have to Opt-out of any lists or "sharing". That should be the default.

Many ISPs offer more than one email address per account. Don't use the primary account at all and set up secondary accounts for everyday use. If worse comes to worst, you can cancel that email address and create a new one.

When picking an email address, pick one that won't be subject to dictionary attacks. Fred@example.com is much more likely to get spam than Fred368p@example.com

If you get your own domain, you will get different email options depending on who hosts it for you. At a minimum you can probably get several (if not unlimited) email addresses related to your domain. Use them and change them as needed. Sometimes they will be forwarded to another address, sometimes you can use the email servers of your domain host. You can register and have a domain hosted for the price of a couple of fast food meals. Prices for domain registrations and hosting vary wildly, so check around. I have some domains registered for $6.95 [US]/year. Sometimes domain registrations are included free with hosting packages. See what people you know recommend.

Never, ever post a real email address to Usenet. See the link for the Email Address Munging FAQ or my own shorter (and more recent) version. As a test I created an address just for a newsgroup. That address has never been used anywhere else, and only used once before I got spammed. It took less than a week for the first spam to show up. It ended up getting so much spam I closed it. Proper munging can minimize the exposure.

Think at least twice about providing an email address to web page or a joke mailing list or anything similar. At a minimum read their Privacy Policy carefully. If you have to do it, this is a good place to take advantage of the services of sites like Sneakemail and Spamgourmet.com. Do your friends a favor and don't give their address out either, no matter how funny the joke is. And if you've got to forward a joke to all your friends, please clean all the extra email addresses out of it first. I've have gotten some with over 200 addresses in them, and all it takes is for one recipient to be infected with a virus and all those addresses are harvested.

If you have a web page, munge your email address on it, or the spam bots will almost certainly harvest it. If you do it right, the bots won't be able to read it, but when someone clicks on it they'll still be able to use it. The first 6 links below will help you do it. Keep in mind that if you use a Javascript method, people who aren't using Javascript won't be able to see it. And some methods aren't clickable, images for instance, which can be an inconvienience for the person trying to contact you. So if you want people to contact you from your web page, you need to make it easy while protecting your address.

Spam Tracking and Reporting

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Privacy Issues on the Internet

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Urban Legends



Disclaimer:

Keep in mind that I am not responsible for any external sites linked to from my pages. They may look different to you, or even have effects on your browser or computer that are different than what I see due to different security settings and browsers. They could have also changed since I looked at them. To the best of my knowledge, they are all safe. But you surf at your own risk.

This document reflects the opinions of the author. This document is provided "as is" without any express or implied warranties. While every effort has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this article, the author/maintainer and/or contributors assume(s) no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

Privacy Policy:

The only information that I collect is page hit counts. My web host Penguinhost.net keeps track of lots of things and makes the information available to me in pretty graphs and logs. I look at them occasionally, but there is no personally identifiable information there.



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This page was last updated Nov 26, 2009.
Copyright 2006-2009 by Kevin