Our Privacy Policy
Talisman Music maintains mailing lists for announcing our performances and products, and related information. We also offer products for sale through our web store, using PayPal for secure online ordering and payment.
We take the issue of online privacy very seriously. Rest assured that, whether you join our mailing list or order from our web store, your name, e-mail address, and other personal information will never be used for unrelated purposes or made available to anyone else for any reason. We do not add people to our mailing lists unless specifically requested, and we will not flood your mailbox with unnecessarily frequent messages. Once or twice a month (usually less often) is typical.
About Spam and Privacy
We are also committed to helping you protect your own online privacy and eliminate unwanted spam e-mail. Below is part of a recent edition of the Firetrust Newsletter. We, too, have noticed a dramatic increase in the volume of spam over the past few months, and we hope you will find this information useful. Please note: although we concur with the recommendation to run anti-virus software, we have not personally tested or used the AVG anti-virus program he recommends.
We are so satisfied with MailWasher that we became a Firetrust affiliate site. If you are fed up with all the
spam and you are in the market for a top-quality, easy-to-use tool for getting rid of spam, please
click here to find out
more about MailWasher and to download your own copy.
TIP: Using BCC: on your group e-mails
And here's a tip for e-mailers. Many people send e-mail messages to a group (large or small) of others, to announce events, share jokes, passing on family news, etc. Often, recipients of such messages can see the e-mail addresses of ALL the other recipents. Now, I would never take advantage of that situation by adding all those other people to my own mailing lists. But I'm never quite so sure about all those other people, who now also have access to my e-mail address -- especially if the message gets forwarded to others!
Here's how to protect the privacy of your friends, associates, and family members when you send out a group mailing. Just put your own e-mail address in the TO: line of your message, and use BCC: for everyone else. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. (How's that for arcane and archaic terminology?) It means that nobody (except you) will be able to see the name of anyone addressed BCC: on the message. So, if you BCC: everyone except yourself, each person receiving your message will see only you and himself or herself in the header.
FIRETRUST NEWSLETTER 
Hi,
As you may have noticed, over the past couple of months spam has got a lot worse. So I thought it's probably a good time to send you some tips and ideas to get around the ever increasing flood of spam.
Get rid of your catch-all account
We've had a number of people writing to us this last month saying they get around 2,000-3,000 emails a day. And you thought you had it bad! Anyway, after speaking to these people it turns out, they own their own domain name, e.g. @company.com. Now spammers have little regard to who they send their spam to, so they will try any address at the domain name you own.
So, instead of just getting email to their own named email address, they were getting email sent to anyone at the domain name they owned. Eg. If they had an email address bob@company.com they were also receiving email addressed to mary@company.com, simon@company.com, mark@company.com, house@company.com, car@company.com, boat@company.com, anything@company.com, xhfrngy@company.com ... (you get the picture) ...
Once we told them to call their internet provider and to change their email account from a 'catch-all' account to only getting email addressed to their email address, they experienced a huge reduction in spam.
This was only for people who get email to their own domain name, so don't annoy your internet provider if you don't have one.
Use an Anti-virus - this one is free
If you didn't know it already, the majority of spam is sent by people who have viruses on their computers. Not only do people not know they have a virus on their computer, they don't know they are sending spam.
This is how it happens. A person doesn't have antivirus installed and gets a virus. The virus is the type which turns the computer into a zombie, that is, the virus allows the spammer to control the computer and use it to send out spam.
Of course it is very difficult to track and stop spam from these computers as one spammer may control around 50,000 computers to send out their spam.
So, INSTALL ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE ON YOUR COMPUTER! And tell your friends to do too, and they can tell their friends etc.
If your current antivirus subscription has run out, then it's not working for you any more. Either pay for another year or download AVG antivirus which is completely free to use and works very well. Get it here - http://www.grisoft.com/doc/products-avg-anti-virus-free-edition/lng/us/tpl/t pl01
The current state of spam
A few years ago, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates predicted that spam would be eradiacated by 2006 but if anything, it's getting worse. As you've probably realised, fighting spam is a bit of an arms race. We block something, they get around it and so on....
The main problem of spam is that it's an economic problem. If it wasn't profitable to send spam, it would almost certainly stop.
So what can we all do to stop the flood of junk email?
The answer is simple :
DON'T EVER EVER BUY ANYTHING ADVERTISED IN A SPAM EMAIL!
Of course you should never buy something featured in a spam email, no matter how good it looks. Even if you don't get defrauded out of your money, you're encouraging the spammer to keep sending his junk messages.
This latest spam outbreak is proving harder and harder to block. Either it uses lots of unrelated words together or is composed of an image, with random noise to avoid detection. We are busy working on solutions to better detect this type of spam and we'll be rolling out a new product in the near future.
Until then, make sure you follow the guidelines I've laid down for you.
Thank you to all of you who send us your comments and suggestions. We enjoy hearing from you - please keep
in touch. And feel free to forward this newsletter on to your friends and family.
Have a great day!
Nick Bolton and the team at Firetrust
www.firetrust.com
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