The “Typhoid Mary” article explained why it’s a Really Bad Idea to copy lots of people in the To: or Cc: of an email. Recently a church friend made the comment “Just use a Mac, you won’t get the spam.” That’s not exactly true and I’ll explain why.
Spam is not a PC or Mac thing, it’s an email thing. The way people get spam is that their email address has been gathered or guessed by cybercriminals. I say cybercriminal because there is a federal law against sending unsolicited email to zillions of people, and to distinguish them from people who simply have poor taste or moral stature. So regardless of whether you use a Mac, PC or even one of those newfangled smartphones, if you use email you will get spam.
The traditional response to the deluge is to use a spam filter. The filter can be on the email server or the “client” such as MS Outlook. Regardless of where the filter resides, they work the same way – they look for terms or phrases the filter considers offensive, and if the email contains matches email is marked as spam.
End of story? Not quite. The filter isn’t intelligent; it makes mistakes. You still have to go through the “spam” mailbox to fish out the wrongly accused “good” emails, and the filter doesn’t catch all the spam. The cybercriminals have gotten creative about misspelling gender-specific anatomy and pharmaceuticals so that the spam filters don’t catch them. Sometimes the misspellings are due to the author being from Rumania or wherever and no speaky engleesh.
Another issue is that, when you start to accumulate a lot of spam, it can start to slow down retrieving your email, especially if you’re on a slow connection. Also if you’re getting email on a smartphone it’s impractical to get lots of junk email. It’s too much work to slog through them, and just imagine your phone buzzing away back in the pew while you’re trying to serve Communion! I was receiving 600-700 a day at one point. I’ll explain why and how I solved the problem in the “Can the Spam” series.
So, back to the Mac thing. What’s different? I would agree that the Mac is probably a lot more secure than a PC running Windows – Microsoft is notoriously poor at security. Also, I’d guess PC’s with Windows outnumber Mac’s at least 10 to 1. So, just like having good lock on your door to discourage burglars, it’s easier and more fruitful for the cybercriminals to pick on the computers with swiss cheese for security. A Mac is much less likely to get a computer virus and hence probably not the 1 in 20 whose PC is chugging out spam for the cybercriminals. That’s the only difference with regard to spam. You can still be Typhoid Mary with a Mac by copying all your friends on the To: or Cc:
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