SPMUG 647 How to Avoid Spam 
Spammers have countless ways to obtain email
addresses, including scouring corporate directories, pulling email
addresses from the address books of virus-infected PCs, and obtaining
addresses from supposedly private databases. In some cases, they simply
make addresses up, hoping to hit a small percentage of viable ones. It
costs spammers very little to send millions of copies of a message. If
the majority of those messages go to invalid addresses, it's no skin off
a spammer's nose. As long as spammers get the low yield they need to
make money (in other words, suckers who respond to their pitches),
they're satisfied. Given this onslaught of spam, what should we do to
protect ourselves? Start by swearing to never, ever reply to a message
that includes an unsolicited advertisement. Also ignore removal
instructions in spam messages. This is simply a trick to help spammers
learn that your address is active. Additionally, refrain from clicking
on links that take you to Web sites that seek personal information. You
can also use some of the features built into your email client. For
example, all email clients include rules or filters that let you sort
your messages by sender. Specifically, if a message's sender is not in
your address book, the message can be deemed junk and sent to a folder
you've reserved for spam. This kind of whitelist filtering is effective
if you receive emaiI from a select group of people. You can also
configure your email client to filter specific kinds of attachments --
files that end with .scr and .pif, for example, which are invariably
attached to spam. And to protect against Web bugs, you can turnoff the
automatic display of images in HTML messages. You can also let your
email client take a swing at your mail with its own built-in spam
filter. While its tools can certainly help reduce the amount of spam you
receive, they don't do as good a job as some third-party programs
designed specifically to destroy spam. Macworld Magazine