The 1 November spot covered registering domain names, spam and wardriving. We've had a lot of feedback about the spam and a lot of listeners recommending Mailwasher. Two listeners also mentioned their Internet providers, Netspeed and IInet, are blocking spam and viruses. We'd like to encourage all Internet providers to follow suit.

Unsubscribing from e-mails

Jo had received a message saying she was on a US based mailing list and she found couldn't unsubscribe from the list. Sadly, this is probably another con for these people to find a live e-mail address. You should never reply to any unsolicited e-mails, not to unsubscribe, not to complain and certainly not to buy anything from these people.

1900 diallers

Howard had a client who, after visiting a website, found her system was dialling into the Internet through a premium rate number. We recommend barring 1900 numbers on any line that is connected to a computer. We have covered this nasty little scam previously.

Excessive Internet bills

Large bills aren't just incurred by people with rogue diallers on their computers. If you exceed the hour or download allowance on your access plan you can expect to get a substantial bill. Nick had Kazaa installed on his computer and received a bill for excessive usage. We've previously covered ways of avoiding this.

Web Searching

Wading through the results of a web search for the pages you want can be time consuming and irritating. It certainly irritates Matthew, who called in to complain about the search engines. Like all computer programs, search engines are only as good as the information entered. Understanding Boolean searches will help you get more from most search engines, Google doesn't support Boolean searches but has it's own methods.

Once again, our thanks to all the listeners and callers. Our apologies to the callers who couldn’t get through, as usual we had a full switchboard. If you’d like to be informed of upcoming advice spots, please e-mail us. Otherwise, keep an eye on our site or the Nightlife website.