I recently received an email from Google on how to avoid phishing, or attempts by criminals to fraudulently collect passwords, credit card numbers, and other sensitive information through email.

Here are some basic tips on how to avoid these scams:

• Don’t reply to or click on links in emails that ask for personal, financial, or account information.
• Check the message headers. The From: address and the Return-path should reference the same source.
• Instead of clicking on the links in emails, go to the websites directly by typing the web address into your browser, cutting and pasting it, or using bookmarks.
• If on a secure page, look for “https” at the beginning of the URL and the padlock icon in the browser.
• Keep your computer’s antivirus, spyware, browser, and security patches up to date, and regularly run system scans.
• Review your accounts regularly and check for unauthorized activity.
• Use a browser that has a phishing filter (Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera).

For those of you who opted for the premium spam filtering service called Postini, here are some links for illustrated, step-by-step instructions on how to use it. The links will take you the respective email support pages on the HostMySite website.

• Adjust your Blatant Spam Blocking Settings - The following article explains how to adjust your Blatant Spam Blocking settings. Blatant Spam Blocking (BSB) is a setting for your domain that detects and deletes the most obvious spam before it reaches your email server. The spam messages are either bounced or deleted and aren’t included in your quarantine summaries. View instructions
• Adjust your Premium Spam Filtering Filter Settings - The following article explains how to adjust your Premium Spam Filtering filter settings. Premium Spam Filtering filtering is based on 4 categories: ‘Sexually Explicit,’ ‘Get Rich Quick,’ ‘Special Offers,’ and ‘Racially Insensitive.’ You have the option of adjusting the overall level of filtering or adjusting each category. Filters are adjusted on a per user basis, allowing each user to determine their own level of filtering. View instructions

The hosting that we set up for our clients via HostMySite (HMS) includes a basic level of spam filtering. This works pretty well for most of our clients, but sometimes it’s not enough for the heavy-duty spam dumping that some of you need. Personally, I used to get 300-500 spam messages EACH day until I got completely fed up. Then, just in time, HMS announced their partnership with a company called Postini.

Postini is the ultimate spam killer. You pay $1 per email account, per year … well worth the reduction of my own spam to somewhere around 1-2 annoying junk emails each week. I’m no longer pounding my desk and yelling at the internet gods for creating such a time- and energy-sapping entity called spam.

Contact us if you’d like to try out Postini for 30 days. You won’t regret it!

Spam: It’s such a simple little word, yet it at the very mention of it, email users everywhere roll their eyes and exert a cry of frustration that spammers on the other side of the world could probably hear…if they were paying attention. Well, here’s some good news for all of you who have had it with the constant virtual waste: Spammers are paying better attention to the objections now, now that the Virginia Supreme Court has convicted Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, North Carolina, of massive distribution of junk email and sentenced him to nine years in prison.

Jayne was considered one of the world’s top 10 spammers in 2003, and authorities believe that his enterprise grossed up to $750,000 a month from sending 10 million illegal emails a day. Jayne claimed that Virginia’s anti-spamming law violates the First Amendment and the U.S. Constitution’s interstate commerce clause, but the court disagreed in a 4-3 ruling.

In response, Attorney General Bob McDonnell said, “This is a historic victory in the fight against online crime,” but the ruling certainly doesn’t mean that spammers are going to give up in fear. Rather, it means that spam is a serious matter that we need to deal with by turning frustration into action and enabling an effective spam filter on our email accounts. If you decide that you’d like Dogpaw to manage your web hosting, you don’t have to do a thing to enable the spam filter; a default filter comes with all web hosting accounts.

Or for greater protection, Dogpaw provides a spam filtering service with hosting called Postini, which filters all email through the Postini servers before you receive it. It then delivers the legitimate messages and quarantines the spam. It’s extremely effective, and it’s only $1 per email account, per year. That’s a really small price to pay for protecting yourself from spam and all of the clogged inboxes and undesirable content that comes with it, an endeavor that Dogpaw takes as seriously as the Virginia Supreme Court did.