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The Internet, and the services it provides, such as e-mail and the World Wide Web, are wonderful resources. However, there are always people ready to take advantage of it to hurt others. When using these services, we must always be on our guard.
Of course, the most common abuse of the system, one which almost everyone will encounter, is spam - unsolicited commercial e-mail. These are unwanted messages intended to sell everything from drugs to pornography. The best way to avoid spam is to avoid giving your e-mail address to anyone who will misuse it. However, it is hard to know who that is, and once your address gets to any spammer, it will quickly spread widely.
The best advice for dealing with spam is, never respond to these messages in any way, not even to ask to be removed from the mailing list. The people who send this stuff will not stop, they will just use your message as confirmation that they have the right address, and send even more garbage.
Many ISPs provide "spam filters" - they remove as much spam as they can automatically from your incoming e-mail. This can work very well, but there is a danger that they may mistake a useful message as spam. If you use such a service, it is probably best to arrange to have messages saved in a special file, if possible, so you can quickly check them before deleting them. This is more work than having them discarded completely, but a lot less than deleting them individually.
Sales pitches, however unwanted, are usually pretty easy to recognize and ignore. However, there are some types of messages that are harder to see as scams, and can easily fool you when you first encounter them.
Some of these are simply a nuisance. They are electronic versions of age-old chain letters. They ask you to forward a message to everyone you know. Often they include an incentive - perhaps suggesting a corporation will donate money to a charity for every message sent. (Why would they do that? How would they count the messages?) Some contain a warning about some (usually non-existent) threat, such as a new e-mail virus. These hoaxes are nuisances, and do little harm. However, please do not forward them - their main goal is to waste people's time dealing with them.
Another common scam is to ask you to go to some web site to confirm billing information for some service that you use, such as a bank account. When you get there, you see a web site that looks like part of the company's real site, but which asks you to enter personal information such as your account number, PIN, credit card number, etc. This is known as "phishing." The easiest way to identify such scams is to check the URL (address) of the web site - it will not be part of the company's site. In any event, no honest company would behave this way - never provide private information in response to an e-mail request.
Another serious scam that you may encounter is known as the "Nigerian 419 Scam" (named for the section of the Nigerian Crimimal Code that it violates). For some reason, most of the e-mails related to this scam come from, or claim to come from, Nigeria, although other places have been used. (They are also known as "advance fee scams" - part of a long line of scams, updated to the computer age.)
In this scam, you learn that someone has a large amount of money, (they usually hint that it was illegally obtained). They ask for your help in secretly moving this money out of Nigeria (or elsewhere), in return for a share of the profits. If you get involved in this, you will soon find that they need some money to pay for for various charges involved in the transfer. These charges will keep growing as long as you are willing and able to pay, but the money will never appear. Often they suggest that some of the money is used for bribes, so you think you have become involved in criminal activity, and are afraid to go to the police. People have been swindled of millions of dollars under this scheme. Many people have ended up embezlling funds, firmly convinced they will be able to repay the money once they collect their profits. Suicides and murders have been caused by it.
A variant of this scheme is particularly relevant to churches. You receive a message saying that someone has a sum of money that they want to give to a religious institution. The message has a long, heart-rending story about their life and how the church has benefitted them. After a long search, perhaps from their deathbed, they found your church, and have decided you are the right one to receive their money. As with the Nigerian 419 scam, this will quickly lead to requests for money for fees needed to release the donation.
In all scams such as this, the answer is simple - do not send money. If the offer is real, they would take the fees involved from the cash to be sent.
Another scam that many find attractive is "work at home" offers. Ads offer to teach you how to get started in some form of work out your house. This may be stuffing envelopes, typing, assembling parts into products, or various other schemes. The "stuffing envelopes" scheme advises you to post ads offering to help people get into the stuffing envelope business - the envelopes you stuff are ones replying to anyone who answers your ads. The "typing at home" offer sells you a book advising you to put up ads at universities, etc., offering to type essays - you don't need a book to know how to do that. The assembly scheme involves selling you the parts, then rejecting all your results as poor quality. All of these schemes have one thing in common - you are asked to pay to work. Honest companies do not expect their workers to pay them.
A common work-at-home offer can lead to much greater losses and possibly involvement in illegal activities. A company asks you to serve as its local representative, cashing cheques and forwarding the money, less a substantial commission. In some cases, the cheques are forged and the scammers are looking for people to try to cash them, and be held responible if (when) caught. Other times, the cheques bounce shortly after you have forwarded the money - this can happen even if your bank tells you they have cleared. There are various other ways this scam can operate. Rest assured - no legitimate company would really pick someone at random, hand him a lot of money, and trust him to pass it on.
The vast majority of e-mail users are honest and sincere. We must not let a few "bad apples" make us overly cynical, or make us abandon a valuable tool. However, we must be alert to the possibility to abuse.