Hi Scotty,

I am trying to remember if you installed some type of firewall on our computer.  And I think it may have expired - we are starting to get a lot of junk that we haven't received in the past year or so.  

I did find firewall under security and it is turned off.  I didn't want to turn it on until I heard from you.

What should I do?
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I did not turn on your Mac’s built in firewall. The purpose of a firewall is to block unwanted traffic over certain ports or pathways of the internet. For instance, Skype uses a certain port, iChat uses another, iTunes store uses yet a different one, and email uses a completely different set as well. There are many many ports however, since you use a router in your home that helps a lot and generally you are safe from things a firewall would otherwise be helping to block. The router acts as a shield for port traffic.

Now with all this being said, it sounds more like the junk you are talking about is email. Is that correct? If this is the case, then Firewall are irrealevent. What is relavent is who has your email address. The more we expose our email addresses the more probable junk mail becomes. Even when others send out email with your email as a recipient, your address can be compromised just being on the list. It’s very hard to keep your email address protected but you can use junk mail filtering to help limit it.