Avoiding Scams, Hoaxes And Urban Legends

A very popular subject within the internet today is all about avoiding scams, hoaxes and urban legends. Below are a few ways of avoiding some of the perils associated with being in touch with the rest of the world via the internet . As a general rule, watch out for any offer that sounds too good to be true, it usually is.. This is applicable to goods being offered on the Internet and particularly to any unsolicited offer or spam you receive in your email. Most of these are scams. The phrase "spam", just in case you do not know, refers to any unsolicited bulk email. If it isn't addressed to you personally, or you don't recognize the sender, or you are being asked to purchase something or pass on questionable information, then that's spam. My advise is to "can the spam" immediately by deleting any email you receive from anyone you do not know. The best way of avoiding spam, is to be very careful about who you give your email address to. My advise here is to set up a free email account so that you can give this email address to anyone you do not absolutely trust with your personal information. It almost never does any good to fight back against spam. Your best course of action is just to delete any unwanted email. A trick that continues to be pretty successful for myself is to set up an email rule (or filter) that automatically sends any mail not addressed to me straight to a special folder. The majority of this is spam and can also be easily disposed of. Along with spams and scams, the other thing to look out for on the Internet is hoaxes, urban legends and false information. You will discover most of these floating around the Internet these days. Beware of any email that asks you to send money for any cause, or to forward the email to all your friends. Nearly all of these are hoaxes. Another category of hoaxes involves virus warnings. When you receive information which suggests it is possible to get a computer virus from doing anything except opening an email attachment or running an application, then this also is probably false information. Most computer viruses are spread by users opening email attachments that contain the virus. You should never open an eMail attachment unless you are expecting one. Even if you know the sender, ensure the attachment is legitimate before opening it. It is a lot safer to delete any questionable attachments and ask the sender to resend them than to assume that the sender intended to send that email. Your best defenses against computer viruses are: 1) Caution in downloading programs from questionable sources. 2) Regularly scanning your drive with virus protection software. 3) Backing up all of your important data to a different drive or media (floppy, Zip or CD-ROM) as often as possible. By doing all of these, if your system does get infected, you can restore it with a minimum of hassle.

This article does not cover everything, but hopefully I have given you an insight in to what is involved. There are plenty of ebooks and such stuff on the internet. I always go to a company called PC Repair London. They do not just repair computer systems, they also provide IT support as well and they are always helpfull if you get stuck on anything.