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What is Spam?
Email spam is unsolicited bulk commercial or junk email sent to a number of users at once. Spam is often used to advertise products or to broadcast some political or social commentary. Spammers typically send a piece of e-mail to a distribution list in the millions, expecting that only a tiny number of readers will respond to their offer.
What is considered a Spam activity by Etisalat?
According to Etisalat's Acceptable Use Policy, the following activities are identified as spamming activities
1. To send unsolicited mass e-mailing (spamming or bulk junk e-mail) to Internet users be it on Etisalat Internet or any other Internet service provider.
2. To post private e-mail messages to any newsgroup, forum or mailing list without the explicit approval of that entity
3. To post or send e-mail to any person who does not wish to receive it, if a recipient asks to stop receiving e-mail. In such a case, your spam email needs to have a facility to remove the customer from the list should he/she opt to be removed
When can I send information about my products and services to email users?
You can send information to email users, only if you have their written consent and you can prove that they want to receive such material. However, if you are the email administrator of an email domain hosted with Etisalat, e.g. yourcompany.ae, you have the right to send all type of emails to your domain email accounts about your products and services.
From where do spammers get my email address?
Etisalat does not sell or otherwise disclose its users’ email addresses to third parties. Spammers use a number of techniques to collect email addresses such as Usenet (Internet news), use of spambot, a program designed to collect, or harvest, e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, online competitions and chat services that requires you to submit your email details and so on.
How can I protect my Etisalat email account from spam?
You can try one of the following methods
1. Use the Etisalat Web interface filter technology: This guide will help you maintain your mailbox free of spam emails.
2. If you use Outlook or any other popular email clients, use the filtering capability to instruct your email program to handle incoming spam email.
3. Manually identify spam messages with few common characteristics, such as: *, excessive use of exclamation marks in the subject header (!!!!!!), indiscriminate use of dollar symbols (e.g. $$$), "hot" marketing words, like "money", "cash", "millions", "FREE" etc. *
4. Use third-party anti-spam tools that will automate the filtering process
5. Use more than one Etisalat account for different purposes
6. Disguise you Etisalat email address with techniques for concealing your email address, such as "munging" your email address
Where can I get third-party anti-spam tools?
You can try to access the following links for anti-spam tools
Internet Industry Association - National Spam Initiative (Includes free anti spam trial vendors) http://www.iia.net.au/nospam/
SpamKiller - http://www.spamkiller.com/
SpamBuster - http://www.contactplus.com/products/spam/spam.htm
SpammerSlammer - http://www.spammerslammer.com/
MailTalkX - http://www.softbytelabs.com/
What is “munging” email addresses?
Email address munging involves inserting extra characters in your email address that will fool the automated software that spammers use to harvest email addresses, but which does not trick those trying to send you legitimate email. For instance, say your email address is yourname@eim.ae. You might reconfigure your software to show that your email address is: yourname@nospam.eim.ae. Most users will realise that they should remove the "nospam." component of the email address before trying to reply to you. However, automated email address harvesting programs will consider it to be a valid email address, and won’t strip the extra component from the address, with the result that the spammer will use an invalid email address when trying to send spam to you.
How do I setup a spam filter, in my web mail for my Etisalat email account?
1. Log on to www.eimmail.ae using your user name and password
2. Choose Profile from a list of functions on the left-hand side column
3. In the Profile page, select Setting option at the top right side of the screen
4. Click on Manage incoming messages, and select Set Mail Filter
5. Click the Add function to add a new mail filter
What functions are available for me to manage my mail filters?
Following are a list of functions to help you manage your mail filters
Add - This function helps you to create a new mail filter
Edit - Edit an existing mail filter. Edit a filter from the list and click Edit.
Remove - To remove a mail filter by selecting the filter from the list
Move up - To move an existing mail filter up in the list
Move Down - To move and existing mail filter down in the list
What functions are available for me to manage my messages automatically?
Following are a list of functions to help you manage messages automatically
Discard large messages - This function allows you to discard messages by size, just choose the size of mail you want to discard.
Reject large messages - This is the same feature as Discard large messages, but in addition, you can send an automatic message to the sender telling him or her why you rejected their messages.
File to folder - This rule arranges emails into folders, by redirecting incoming emails to specific folders based on customer input phrase.
Spam message - If you would like to stop receiving mails from a specific person or a specific source, just mention the address or the name clearly in the box.
Redirect messages - This rule redirects messages to a specified address based on your preference. For example, if you would like to receive all your Etisalat mail messages in another e-mail account, just write the e-mail address correctly and all your incoming messages will be redirect to the e-mail address you have chosen.
Redirect and copy messages - Exactly same function as redirecting messages but with the facility to copy a second party.
Reject messages - This rule rejects messages based upon criteria you decide on, like specifying contains of the message.
What is Etisalat doing to protect me from spam?
Currently at the network level, Etisalat takes the following steps to protect your email account from spammers
1. Throttles email from high-volume sources
2. Blocks known spammers on an adhoc basis
3. Provides users with the option subscribe to use the anti spam filters available as part of the Etisalat web mail
4. Limits the number of recipients for incoming and outgoing messages to 50 email addresses only
How can I minimize receiving spam on my Etisalat mail account?
There are a number of strategies users can adopt to avoid or minimise spam.
Keep your email address private especially the one on your business cards.
Do not send your real email address to any newsgroup or mailing list.
Always check the privacy act before submitting your real email address.
Never reply to spam messages because this will confirm that your email address is real.
Unless it is a mailing list you have subscribed to DO NOT click any unsubscribe links within the email.
When you publish your email address on your web site, use a form that allows users to submit email messages via your web site.
