These hoaxes usually arrive in the form of an email. Please disregard the hoax emails - they contain bogus warnings usually intent only on frightening or misleading users. The best course of action is to merely delete these hoax emails. Please refer to this page whenever you receive what appears to be a bogus message regarding a new virus, or promotion that sounds too good to be true.

Do not forward hoax messages. There have been cases where email systems have collapsed after dozens of users forwarded a false alert to everybody in the company.

For more information about virus hoaxes, see F-Secure's Hoax Warnings web site.  This page is considered the industry standard information source for new virus hoaxes and false alerts.

• Do Not, ever, click on the REMOVE link SPAMmers add to their emails to you. This also will verify your email address as VALID and your address will be added to the list and sold to more Spammers
• Some spam emailers use computer programs to guess at email addresses. So use unusual email addresses containing numbers and letters e.g. fred245pride@example.com
• If you want to enable users of your website to contact you online, provide a form. But make sure the "send to" email address is not contained in the page HTML, but in the form processing script.
• Spammers use special programs that extract email addresses from Web sites and Usenet postings. To avoid ending on a spammer's mailing list when you post to a Web forum or a newsgroup, you can obscure your email address by inserting something obvious into it. If your email address is fred@example.com,  modify it to read fred@your[delete_this]example.com.  
• Never reply to spam messages, even when they entice you to reply to "remove" you from their mailing lists. Often the instructions are either bogus, or a way to collect more addresses. Replying confirms to the spammers that your email address is active, and you may receive even more junk mail.
• Remove your email address from your website's pages and provide a web based mail form instead. This way spammers can't send robots to your page to harvest email addresses and put them on their mailing lists.
• Removing your email adresses is not always practical on business websites. Therefore, Encode your email address on html pages. So instead of fred@example.com insert "domain.com" instead. It will render the same on the html page, but makes it far harder to be harvested by spammers. (ProExe provides this encoding service)

For realtime spam and anti-virus filtration use ProExe's TrustedMail.

If you believe your email address has been compromised or there are emails being sent out in your name which you are not sending, please copy the email headers from one of the emails that were sent and open a new support ticket.  We can then verify for sure that the email did not come from your servers and work toward a resolution.

If it did not come from your server, unfortunately there's not much you can do other than wade through the mass emails until they decide to quit and move on to the next place. Using the header information we'll be able to find out what data centre is responsible for sending the mail and we can contact them to have them potentially shut down for spamming etc.

Often the filters in ProExe's TrustedMail can be utilised, to help reduce the impact of spoofing.

2. When possible, avoid email attachments both when sending and receiving email.

3. Configure Windows to always show file extensions. In Windows XP, this is done through Explorer via the Tools menu: Tools -> Folder Options -> View - and uncheck "Hide file extensions for known file types". This makes it more difficult to for a harmful file (such as an EXE or VBS) to masquerade as a harmless file (such as TXT or JPG).

4. Never open email attachments with the file extensions VBS, SHS or PIF. These extensions are almost never used in normal attachments but they are frequently used by viruses and worms.

5. Never open attachments with double file extensions such as NAME.BMP.EXE or NAME.TXT.VBS

6. Do not share your folders with other users unless necessary. If you do, make sure you do not share your full drive or your Windows directory.

7. Disconnect your network or modem cable when you're not using your computer - or just power it down.

8. If you feel that an email you get from a friend is somehow strange - if it is in a foreign language or if it just says odd things, double-check with the friend before opening any attachments.

9. When you receive email advertisements or other unsolicited email, do not open attachments in them or follow web links quoted in them.

10. Avoid attachments with sexual filenames. Email worms often use attachments with names like PORNO.EXE or PAMELA_NUDE.VBS to lure users into executing them.

11. Do not trust the icons of attachment file. Worms often send executable files which have an icon resembling icons of picture, text or archive files - to fool the user.

12. Never accept attachments from strangers in online chat systems such as IRC, ICQ or AOL Instant Messenger.

13. Avoid downloading files from public newsgroups (Usenet news). These are often used by virus writers to distribute their new viruses.

14. Check for the closed padlock or key symbol (SSL) in the browser window when entering your credit card details and other personal / financial information on a web site.

15. Use anti-virus software and keep the virus recognition data files up to date.

16. Install a firewall. They're not as complicated as you might think.

The Real-time Block List (RBL) is a real-time database of IP addresses of spam-sources, including known spammers, spam gangs, spam operations and spam support services.

The database is kept updated every day, around the clock, by RBL project team members around the world.

How much spam will the RBL block for me?
 It depends on many factors: how many domains one hosts, how many email addresses the domains have, how many email addresses have been harvested by spammers or pulled out by dictionary attacks, geographic "ccTLDs", and other spam-profile factors.

Current numbers show the RBL's can stop, on average, about 50-70% of incoming spam.

How often is the RBL updated?

The RBL DNS zone is rebuilt and reloaded every 15 minutes, 24/7, to ensure that new spam problems are swiftly blocked and that fixed problems are swiftly removed. For high redundancy there are over 40 public mirrors located in many nations around the world.