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Orange - Communicate - About Spam

What is spam?

Spam is unsolicited, commercial junk mail - essentially marketing emails which you did not agree to receive.

Marketing material sent by companies to whom you have given your email address, along with your consent to receive such mailings, is not spam.

Be vigilant about who you give your email addresses to and to whom you give permission to send email to that address.

Unfortunately, even the most careful web-user is likely to encounter spam at some point as there are so many ways your email address can make it into the hands of spammers.

How does Orange’s free Anti-spam service work?

Our Anti-spam service is provided free for all customers using a Orange email. For Broadband customers, the system automatically filters your incoming emails and ‘tags’ messages it recognises as spam with a clearly marked *** SPAM ***. This should make it easy for you to select and delete these mails.

You will need to turn your settings on by logging into your webmail account from orange.co.uk, clicking on the Anti-Spam link on the left hand side, down the page, and selecting the option that says "you have asked for junk mails to be sent to: 'your junk mail folder'".

Occasionally, you may receive spam emails which are not caught by our spam filters, if this happens you can report the email to us by using the ’Spam’ button in Webmail, helping us update our systems to identify similar messages in future. However, please note that you can't do this from an email program like Outlook Express or Lotus Notes.

How can I stop spammers getting hold of my email address?

Spammers have many techniques for gathering email addresses, from simple guesswork to the automated ‘harvesting’ of email addresses found on the Internet (in newsgroups or on webpages for example). With the sheer volume of spam being sent these days, it is proving increasingly difficult to avoid spam completely, but there are many tricks and tips to help you keep your email address confidential, here are just a few:

1) Only give your email address to people you know and trust.

2) Try setting up a separate email account to use when shopping online or registering with websites or forums, keeping your ‘main’ email address confidential.

3) If a website asks you for your email address, they want to use it for something - make sure you know what. Read the terms of use and privacy policy of any site before telling them your address.

4) Look for a checkbox that lets you opt-in or opt-out of receiving marketing messages when registering on a website. Do you want to make your address available to third-parties? If you give the OK on this, then your email address could end up in the hands of marketing departments all over the globe!

5) Never respond to a spam email. If you recognise it as spam, you should delete the mail immediately. Opening a spam email can verify your address to spammers.

6) Never click the ‘Unsubscribe’ or ‘Remove from mailing list’ link in spam emails. These links are often spoofed and can be used to confirm you are reading their email, collect details from your computer, install malicious programs, redirect you to explicit web-pages, or sometimes even to access web-based programs which change the way your computer connects to the Internet, forcing your PC to dial premium rate phone lines.

7) Never buy anything advertised in a spam email. If nobody bought the things advertised in spam mails, companies might stop paying spammers to advertise their products.

8) Avoid ‘advertising’ your email address on your personal website or in forums or chatrooms. Spammers often trawl the web looking for email addresses to add to bulk mailing lists.