Getting Round Spam
Cheryl-Ann Tan
 One of these days you’ll tire of virus attacks on your widely-used email programs like Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, which you probably chose to use because you can receive mail from Hotmail, which in turn, is overly vulnerable to spam… Fret no more as the electronic cousins of the anarchic Russian (snail-mail) postal system should give you much welcome relief to common email problems like spam, viruses, user-unfriendly interface, lack of security or simply unreliable email service.
Mail.ru offers reliable free email with neat domain names like mail.ru, inbox.ru, bk.ru, etc. as well as web, POP and even WAP access. Mail.ru’s spam filter seems to be able to do the trick with most spam that manages to worm its way through other email services’ spam filters. The web interface comes in several Russian encodings and English as well. Mail.ru offers flexibility by allowing users on the go to access their mailbox via their web interface or via POP and SMTP to their favourite email clients (and yes, even Microsoft Outlook will take it).
On the subject of email clients, Ritlabs, have offered the alternative to the usual selection of Miscrosoft Outlook, Eudora, Mozilla Mail, etc. The award-winning email client, The Bat! manages email in a much more user-friendly and functional package. The Bat!, one of the more popular email clients in Russia, boasts plenty of bells and whistles in addition to a standard email interface. The Bat! includes spam filtering, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy, for the paranoid ones), a message-threading ability, email filtering and a MailTicker that displays information about incoming mail on top of your applications. An import wizard allows you to transfer your mail and address books from other email clients easily. The Bat! is not vulnerable to viruses as it does not automatically execute malicious programs and displays a virus warning when mail with suspicious attachments arrive. There are many more features on The Bat! that will make handling email more efficient and secure.
The Bat!, available in multilingual interfaces, and including English and Russian, is available as a Home Edition, Business Edition, and even has reduced prices for students.
To future protect your computer against viruses, it is best to install an anti-virus software to scan mail as they come in, lest you blindly ignore the virus warnings your email client throws up. Home-grown Kaspersky Anti-Virus may be an option to protect your computer against viruses, worms, Trojans and other malicious programs. From the same range of products, you can find anti-spam programs and anti-hacker programs in different editions (Personal, Business and Corporate). While it does not always seem up to the mark with what’s on the international market and a bit taxing on the computer, some might find it prudent to stick to Symantc or McAfee.
Sign up for a free Mail.ru account at mail.ru.
English interface: eng.mail.ru.
A 30-day trial version of TheBat can be downloaded at www.ritlabs.com.
Kaspersky products are available at http://www.kaspersky.com/
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