Word: spam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...National Do Not Call Registry--covers unsolicited cell-phone traffic, with a $500 fine for abusers. Says the FCC's Dan Rumelt: "Consumers should file complaints with us." In addition, consumer advocates and the FCC recommend that you ask your cell-phone service how it deals with text-message spam under your plan. --By Avery Holton
...reasonably well. Using a simple menu, you set the threshold from moderate to exclusive. The highest level accepts email only from people listed in your address book or from domains you put on your safe list (newsletters you subscribe to, websites you've shopped at, etc.). You can have spam deleted immediately, but if you've chosen the most aggressive filtering option, you'll probably want to set up a junk-mail folder that you can scan for false positives (then retrieve them with a click of the THIS IS NOT JUNK button). Warning: if you maintain a junk-mail...
...YAHOO Since Yahoo rolled out an enhanced version of its SpamGuard back-end filtering system in March, spam reports from users dropped 40%, according to a representative. The bulk-mail filter clears a good bit of spam from your In box but not all. It also traps quite a bit of legitimate mail, so be sure to check it before executing a mass delete. You can create custom filters based on such things as keywords in a message's subject line, but these are the easiest filters to fool. Some spammers simply add a period in the middle...
Finally, there's a community project that attacks spam the way Hollywood used to attack suspected communists: with a blacklist. For $4.99 a month, SpamNet www.cloudmark.com checks your incoming mail against its own ever expanding database. The service's 475,000-plus members contribute by "voting" on what's spam and what isn't, using the BLOCK and UNBLOCK buttons that the SpamNet program adds to your Outlook task bar. Enough votes from individual members and a message is blocked for all. With thousands of reports coming in every second, it can be pretty effective...
...some spam gets through--as some inevitably will--you can always go back to filtering it the old-fashioned way: by hitting the delete key. --By Maryanne Murray Buechner