Sections

Internet connection in Cople

Protecting your computer

Why do I get so much Spam?

Killing spam at source

Internet Connection in Cople

To connect to the Internet you will need either a dial-up line (slow and rapidly becoming obsolete) or a "broadband" connection. Cople is fortunate in that most houses can have a good, fast broadband connection to the Internet.

To use the Internet you need to sign up with an ISP (Internet Service Provider). Some ISP's are well known, large companies, eg BT, AOL, Tiscali, Virgin. Others may not be so well known. When selecting an ISP most people either select a company they have heard of or are guided by a friend's recommendation.

Recommendation

Many people ask me to recommend an ISP, not just in Cople but almost anywhere in the UK. If you are considering installing "broadband" for the first time or wish to change to a different ISP, I recommend Eclipse. They are one of the least expensive and, in my opinion, one of the best.

Eclipse

You may not have heard of Eclipse but they, and their parent company, have a long track record in the telecommunications industry and regularly appear at the top of various "best of" awards.

Support

I have used Eclipse for several years and have been very pleased with them. They have always had very fair contract terms, better than most others I have seen. The support staff are knowledgeable, helpful and based in England. The support department is not open 24 hours, typically until 8pm and closed Sundays, but if this is the price one pays for decent support then I am happy to live with this.

My experience of the more well known companies is one of higher monthly costs, poorer service, expensive overseas support lines, and slower connections. If you are tempted to take an "all inclusive" contract that combines mobile and (maybe) a free broadband, do your sums first. It is so often cheaper and more flexible to take separate contracts for each.

Referral

If you do sign up with Eclipse there is a section in their sign-up form for a Referrer. Please enter the word COPLE here. We will receive a small, one-off commission which goes to offset both the cost of running the Cople and the Friends' web sites. Eclipse does not tell me who has referred us to them, they just send a cheque, so I won't be able to thank you, but I really appreciate it.

get it at www.eclipse.net.uk

Good luck, Ian

Protecting Your Computer

We live in an age when we must take precautions to protect ourselves and our property. Just like you need to lock the doors to your home so you need to "lock the doors" to your computer.

In the computer world there are many "evil" programs (viruses, trojans etc) prowling around looking for an easy target (your computer) to break into. And the more dark corners and alley ways of the Internet that you visit the more likely you will be targeted by several of these sinister programs.

But even if you only ever use your computer to visit the innocent web sites you still need the same protection.

The bad news: No computer will ever be 100% safe regardless of how much protection you afford it

The good news: many of the best protections are FREE, although they will all suggest you buy their more expensive version.

Just a few special programs are needed to protect your computer from most of these "evil" programs. The investment in time to learn to use them will pay off enormously.

This section is aimed at the Windows operating system, especially the popular XP version. Many of these recommendations also apply to other versions of the Windows operating systems, eg Vista or 2000.

I won't go into too many why's and wherefore's of what I recommend but experience has taught me that the following programs are very useful. But first: please be aware, the "best" software recommendations change regularly as competing companies bring out new versions and these recommendations (as at October 2007) can quickly go out of date; second: I am not the world's best computer support person so expect others to disagree with my choice.

AVG

This program can be downloaded and is free to non-business users. It mainly protects against viruses. Get it from http://free.grisoft.com/. The free version is just as good as the commercial version.

NOD32

This is an alternative to AVG. This will cost you a few pounds per year but support services I trust tell me it is the best on the market. Get it from www.eset.com/

Firewall

Many ADSL routers (the box that connects your computer to the broadband telephone line) come with a hardware firewall. This is a useful feature but you should still install a software firewall.

Microsoft have included a simple firewall with their Operating Systems since XP was released. At the very least this should be installed and the Microsoft OS strongly encourages you to do so. However it is only a basic firewall and "power" users prefer to switch this off and install a more substantial product.

My preferred software firewall is Comodo, it is free and you get it from www.comodo.com/.

But Comodo can be a bit "technical", if so then try the free ZoneAlarm, get this from www.zonealarm.com/ but you may need to hunt down the link to the free version on their web site, when I last looked this was the page for the free download version. NB My trusted support man tells me the free ZoneAlarm is not as good as Comodo and not as good as their commercial product.

Is that all?

One virus checker and one firewall are essential for today's computer. You can go further with a "malware" security program, I would suggest the free Microsoft Defender would suffice for most people. Get it from www.microsoft.com

Finally you might want to run a separate "malware" checker each week or so. A couple of good free ones are Spybot and Adaware

Keep Up-to-date

All of these security programs need to be kept up to date. Most will do so automatically, some you need to click the "update" button.

Good luck, Ian

Why do I get so much Spam?

This is a question I am regularly asked. The answer is "for one or more reasons".

What is spam? Spam is any email sent to you when you have not requested it. However most people think of spam as being the emails that try to sell unwanted items, job offers and unexpected windfalls, and those emails that appear to to come from your bank requesting you to "click here and login" (NEVER do this unless you are 100% certain it is from your bank.)

Spam is sent literally by the million to any email address they can find and also to any that they make up. It matters not if there is no such recipient as it costs them nothing to send these emails. Research has shown that if they get just one response in 12 million they will make a very large sum of money.

Once a spammer has your email address you are doomed to receive ever increasing volumes of spam. The more spammers that get your email address the more spam you will get.

NEVER respond to any spam email, never buy anything from them, never try to "click here to remove me from this mailing list", never even open a spam email.

How do they get my email address? From anywhere they can find it, typically...

• Automated scanning of web sites for REPLY TO email addresses. There are software tricks that a web designer can use to disguise these addresses so that they are unlikely to be harvested by a spammer
• Automated scanning of online forums where you have posted a message. Always use a temporary, throw-away address otherwise do not post to forums that displays your email address
• From your friends and relatives who send you an online, amusing "personalised" cartoon, often for your birthday. Legitimate cartoon sites will not send you spam, but how do you know if it is legitimate? My advice is: never send them and if a friend sends you one do not play the cartoon, do not "reply" to the email and preferably never even open the email
• Reading spam. Whenever you open a spam email that contains a graphic image. This can be just an invisible single white dot. The act of opening the email effectively sends a signal back to the spammer that this is a "live" email address and you will be the target of even more spams. It will also happen if your email reader, eg Outlook, is set to display a preview window. More recent versions of Outlook will suppress the graphics in the preview window but the moment you select to see the graphics, even just the once, you will be on the spammers' lists for ever.
• Guessing email addresses. If you have your own domain, eg bloggs.co.uk, you will receive email addressed to this domain with a multitude of likely addresses, eg sales@bloggs.co.uk or john@bloggs.co.uk. There is not much you can do to reduce this other than never accepting the email if it has an incorrect name.
• Buying lists from dubious "newsletters" that you may have registered for
• Hacking unprotected friends' email address books
• Buying lists from other spammers

There are many other sources but I am sure you get the idea by now.

Once you start to get too many spams you can do one of a few things to reduce the problem

• Change your email address. You will need to tell all your friends and businesses your new email address.
• Use a "challenge" system, eg see Spam Arrest below
• Install spam filter software. Some software does a good job of identifying the spam, whilst others generate too many "false positives". See www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-spam-filter-for-experienced-users.htm for some free suggestions.
• Route your email to or through a good spam filter, see below

Routing your email. This is the method I use but it takes a bit of IT effort to get working. I have a number of domains, www.colink.co.uk and www.cople.org.uk, all of which get spam. As a consequence I receive around 1,500 spam emails per day. I route all emails that are not addressed to an acceptable name, eg ian, to a "junk" address where it is deleted without mercy. This removes 75% of the emails. The rest is routed to a Google mail account which does a good job of moving spam into a spam account. It took a few days of "training" the Google spam filter as to which items that it thought were spam but were not spam. I now only see around 5 spams per day that sneak through their filter and can mostly delete the emails in the spam folder without bothering to inspect them. I can read the real emails using my Google account or set my Outlook to take the email in from my Google account.

If you have your own domain the above "routing" method will probably work for you. If you use an email account from an ISP supplier, eg Tiscali or BT, and they are not doing a good enough job removing spam then you could open a Google email account and switch to using that instead of the ISP email address; this has the advantage that should you change ISPs you do not need to change your email address.

Killing Spam at Source

Spam: unwanted email. Anyone with an email account receives spam selling anything from pills to stocks and shares or tricking you into disclosing details of your bank accounts.

If the torrent of spam is getting too much for you it may be time for a "challenge" system. These work by intercepting email to you and automatically sending a return email challenging the sender to respond to a simple question. As a spam email usually has a fictitious return email address the spammer will not see this challenge and will not respond. Even if they were to see it they do not have the time or the inclination to respond to such challenges.

Only the first email from a sender is challenged. After this subsequent emails from this sender will be rerouted to your email box with no further challenges required.

This makes it simple and virtually foolproof to use. Spams are stopped dead in their tracks before they reach you.

There is a charge to use these "challenge" systems, some are expensive but one American based company that has come to my attention who is not too expensive, around £25/year, is Spam Arrest. They offer a 30 day free trial and various short term contracts so you can test them out to see if they do what you need.

Good luck, Ian