There has been a dramatic increase in unsolicited email or "spam" across the board. By law, Alphalink is prohibited from providing information about any of our members unless a certificate has been issued under Section 282, Telecommunications Act 1997 by the appropriate Law Enforcement Agency. Rest assured, we have not sold, given away or otherwise disclosed your email address.

None-the-less, unscrupulous companies are making big money compiling databases of valid email addresses to sell to anyone who wishes to use them for advertising or distributing junk mail over the internet. Until such behaviour is controlled by law, spam will continue to be a sad fact of life for all internet users and no one is immune. As such, the most appropriate way to deal with this is to employ management techniques to minimise its impact.

Alphalink has implemented a spam filtering program called SpamAssassin to assess all incoming email. It tries to identify spam emails and tags them with [SPAM] in the subject line. This makes it easier for you to set up a filter in your email program to isolate and delete these messages. If you do not wish to have your email scanned by SpamAssassin, please contact Technical Support and ask to have spam control disabled for your account.

How to Deal with Spam:

1. Just ignore and delete it.
2. Never reply to the message or ask them to stop sending you email. (Some spammers have information on how to remove yourself from their mail list included in the mail.) This will just confirm that they have a valid email address and they will not only keep sending email to you, but sell it others who will do so as well.
3. Set up your email program to block emails from certain address or with certain subjects (if your mail program supports it). See here for instructions for some common email programs.
4. Use the service offered by Spamcop to report spammers and also to filter your email.
5. Install and use a program called Mailwasher (free, available here) that will generate a false bounce message to spam emails. Bouncing emails will make the spammer think the email address is not current and you will most likely not receive spam from them again. It also enables you to delete any spam emails before downloading them.

You can usually minimise the amount of spam you receive by being careful where you put your email address. For example, some web sites may request your email address - the webmasters of these sites may then sell a list of addresses to a spam list operator, so do not give them your email address unless absolutely necessary.

Some people avoid spam by signing up with a web-based email provider (such as Hotmail or Yahoo), and using that address for most things, and only give their Alphalink email address out to friends and associates.

If you need further assistance with setting up a filter in your email program, contact Technical Support.