Follow these tips to renew your
assault on digital SPAM with vigor
Spam is irritating, contagious, and in some
cases even harmful. There is no room for it in our lives other than causing
distraction and wasting time. When it comes to business, as clichéd as it may
sound, time is money. To reduce any precious second of it being wasted on spam
spawning from our increasingly online activity and digitally dependent lives is
important.
Stop
SPAM, save time
Having said that, spam is notoriously
difficult to evade. It cannot be stopped completely, however hard we try. But
there are ways and means to minimize its impact. In our collective fight
against digital spam at the workplace and generally in our connected lives – we
outline few steps that can go a long way in keeping that all intrusive spam at
bay.
Stop spam SMSes, calls
Unsolicited calls from telemarketers are
almost always more irritating than useful. To their credit, the government’s
leading telecom authority TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) has
enforced telecom providers in the country to setup and maintain a Do Not
Disturb registry – officially known as National Do Not Call Registry. You can
add your number to that list by simply texting START 0 to 1909 to block all
types of telemarketing calls. But if you want to allow calls from certain areas
of interest, TRAI allows you to apply a custom calling block by sending a text
message “START X” to 1909, where X is any one of the following options
represented by their numbers – Banking/Insurance/Financial Products/ Credit
Cards-1, Real Estate-2, Education- 3, Health-4, Consumer goods and
automobiles-5, Communication/Broadcasting/ Entertainment/IT-6, Tourism-7.
Stop
spam SMSes, calls
Having tackled this menace, check out free
third-party apps like Call Control - Call Blocker and Calls Blacklist if you’re
using an Android smartphone. The latter has built a steady reputation for being
a simple, no-frills app to blacklist unwanted callers and block any
communication from them, while the former has all the essential features along
with a community blacklist manager which lets you tap into a wider network of
blacklisted numbers by other users of the app. For iPhones, iBlackList for US
$12 is the most comprehensive app to block spam calls and messages for iOS
users – however, you need to jailbreak your device to download and use the app.
Stop spam emails
An instance of email spam creeping into
your inbox has reduced drastically with email providers deploying smarter
algorithms to catch inbound mails from suspicious mail servers. There is very
little you can do apart from maintaining whitelists or filters for your email
inbox to ensure you’re only troubled by email that you really want. However,
for people who use a desktop email client like Outlook or Thunderbird,
definitely check out something like Spam Bayes – a cross platform spam filter.
It requires users to train the filter, as you classify spam and ham (non-spam,
legit) emails in your inbox, and with time the filter gets better. To deal with
newsletter spam in your inbox, check out Unroll.me, a beta service that lets
you easily fight newsletter spam in your Gmail, Google Apps and Yahoo mail
inbox. Alternatively, you can also add the Unsubscribe.com Chrome extension
which lets you easily drop out of mailing lists in your Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook
inbox.
Unsubscribe
works like a charm
Stop Facebook, Twitter spam
For all its privacy fiasco and social
blunders in the past, Facebook, despite being a behemoth in the social media
space, offers robust built-in features to block and minimize your exposure to
spam messages. The ability to block anything within Facebook is controlled via
the Blocking feature available in your account’s Privacy Settings. Through this
one screen, you can block Facebook users, apps, event invites and app invites,
all in one go. You can also discreetly maintain a restricted list of users people
who aren’t part of your inner circle and Facebook automatically restricts them
to view only your public updates. Additionally, you can install apps like
Norton Safe Web which automatically scans through your Facebook feed to weed
out and eliminate nefarious, spams links.
Twitter is besieged with spam accounts
spewing spam tweet. The lowtech, manual way to block a suspected spam account
is by visiting its profile page, click on the black silhouette icon and click
“Block” or “Report for spam”. Alternatively, you can also check out services
like http://stoptweet.com which identifies
all spam accounts following you, deleting them, and protecting your Twitter
account from spammers in the future.
Stop spam on your company’s blog
If your company’s blog is hosted on a
custom Word press installation, make sure you sign up for a Wordpress.com
account for a free Akismet authentication key. Just copy-paste the key details
into the Akismet plugin on your company’s blog to block 99 per cent spam that
comes its way in the form of malicious comments or trackbacks.
