Expert: Carolyn Meinel - 4/27/2010

Question
What are some of the more recent and robust products avaialble to safe guard against spam and viruses?

Answer
Protection against spam is most effective if done by an Internet service provider instead of by yourself on your home computer. The reason for this is that a spam protection product that runs on your own computer must still download all the incoming spam. As time goes on and your email address gets on more spam lists, downloading spam can eat up lots of time. Worse, if you get "email bombed" by some criminal, you could be hit with thousands of emails per minute and thus be unable to download any of your email.

I've been experimenting with Gmail, which promises spam protection, and it has worked well for me. I'm also using several email addresses on a server at GoDaddy, and it has worked well, too. One of those addresses, cmeinel@techbroker.com, is fifteen years old, yet it only gets hit with a few dozen spam emails each day, way down from a hundred or so it used to get when I used a server that had no spam protection. So that tells me that GoDaddy's spam blocking system is working well.

As for viruses, I recommend more than just an antivirus program, because viruses are only a tiny bit of today's threats. We also need to block worms, which typically propagate by remotely breaking into your computer, Trojans, which may hide in free programs and seemingly harmless things you might download through file sharing programs, and spyware, which often infects your computer through visiting a malicious website. You should look for complete Internet security suites that advertise antivirus plus firewall and spyware protection. Examples are the McAfee, Symantec, F-Secure and Kapersky security suites.

Finally you need to use a safe browser. IE is notorious for being compromised. Chrome, free from Google, and Firefox, free from Mozilla.org, are safer. They also will warn you when you attempt to visit a known malicious website, and keep you from connecting unless you override the warning.

Finally, no matter what security programs you may use, you still have to use common sense. For example, recently I used the Google image search results to look at the Iceland volcano. One of the images I clicked brought up a fake antivirus warning. I immediately used the Chrome back arrow to the Google search page and reported the image as malicious. There are many websites that try to trick you into buying a fake antivirus product by claiming to have detected viruses on your computer. So your only fail safe protection is to use your common sense to spot criminals on the prowl.