Many of us are suffering from an increased number of Spam or junk emails. A lot of times, the email address listed as ‘from’ is really not the sender. Email spoofing is the practice of altering an email header so that it appears to have been sent by someone other than the actual sender. The address a message is intended for (recipient) can also be spoofed. This is why you frequently see junk mail which seems to not be intended for your account. You may even receive a notice that your email is undeliverable when in fact you did not send one. These examples can simply be junk mail or it can contain a virus. One characteristic of a virus is to spoof you. Your email address was obtained because it may be saved in someone’s address book, instant messenger database or local files. The virus then chooses one of the addresses for the sender’s address and another for the recipient. This can make it appear as another person’s computer is infected when in fact it is virus-free. Because viruses and worms do not use the email address of the infected computer, there is no way to track which computer sent the infected email. There is also no way to prevent receiving a spoofed email. If you get an odd looking email, it’s outrageously insulting, asks for something highly confidential, or just plain doesn’t make any sense, either find out directly if it really is from who it says it’s from or just delete it.
Ptcnet.net has teamed up with Postini to provide you the latest tools to help prevent email-borne viruses and junk email from reaching your computer. The virus protection scans your incoming messages before reaching your inbox and is a free service. We still suggest that you maintain an updated virus protection on your computer since viruses can originate from other sources than email.
We also offer the junk email filter for a $1.00/month to decrease the amount of junk you may be currently receiving.
If you have any other questions, need assistance, or would like to sign up for the junk email filter please contact our office.