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By
Tony Gugino
1) What is spam?
It's a luncheon meat, kind of pink, comes in a can, made by Hormel. No,
actually that's SPAM (notice the all caps... Hormel has a trademark on the
word spam typed that way, so be sure to type it in lower case). Spam is
flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to
force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it.
Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products,
get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very
little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the
carriers rather than by the sender. (Credit Abuse.net)
2) Should I hit "remove" or attempt to email the spammer?
NO! Absolutely not. Most of the spam I see comes with instructions on how
to "remove yourself from our list". Yet, more often than not, the remove
instructions don't work. Why is this?
Basically, you've just experienced what many call "rule #1": Spammers lie.
(Read that again - Rule #1 - Spammers Lie.)
Remove lists don't work. Emailing the spammer doesn't work. Even the
United States government has noticed this: "We are also working on (spam)
cases that involve claims that you can opt out, when in fact what clicking
on the link to unsubscribe will do is simply verify that you have a valid
e-mail address, so that you can then get lots of spam instead of a little,"
said Howard Beales, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Don't waste your time trying to jump through the spammers' hoops. Plenty of
people have documented the fact that not only do remove lists not work, they
do exactly what Mr. Beales says: they verify to the spammer that your e-mail
address is good, and so then they put it on their "premium" CD full of email
addresses and sell it to the next spammer for even more money.
3) Ok, so I can't "remove", how do I get rid of spam and decrease how much I
see?
This is a multi-part answer and it's long. So here goes.
A - Get rid of your existing email address, give it out to only people you
actually know, and avoid email accounts with the big players. Yahoo, MSN,
Hotmail, AOL, etc. are all too big of a target. Spammers send hundreds of
millions of emails to their servers a day trying to guess valid email
addresses. Since I'm in Dallas let me give you a fitting analogy... It's
like sitting in the middle of parking lot on a hot and humid summer
afternoon in Dallas and trying not to get rained on. You're eventually
going to get wet. It's just a matter of time.
B - For webmail, I personally suggest Gmail at the moment. B/c they scan
such a large swath of the internet, their spam filters are very effective.
I have yet to have a spam message sneak into my regular Gmail inbox. Plus
they filter for phishing schemes (identity theft come-ons) too.
C - Don't sign up for stuff online using your real email address. If you
sign up for newsletters, websites, freebies, etc., you're going to start
getting spam. It's almost ridiculous now. Use services like dodgeit /
mailinator / spamgourmet / spambob to generate a temporary email address to
use for signing up for stuff. Only give out your real email address once a
company has proven they can be trusted with it.
D - Don't post your email address on a website in text form. I've tested
this extensively before. Within 2 weeks of putting your email address in
any publicly accessible website you will start to get 10-15 spams a day.
And the number will continue to increase the longer your email address is
up. Instead of posting it in normal form like marysue@something.com, type
is like "marysue at the domain something.com". That way a human can read
it, but the email address harvesting software used by spammers can't. If
you're designing your own website, you can make your email address into a
graphic instead of typing it too.
E - Report your spam using an abuse aggregator like SpamCop. Reporting
directly to the ISP is usually like a mosquito biting an elephant. It's
annoying for both parties. SpamCop carries extra weight b/c many companies
and ISPs filter their incoming email based on SpamCop's (http://spamcop.net)
database of abusers. It also makes it easier for the respective ISPs b/c
they have a single interface that shows all the reports against all of their
customers.
F - If you want to keep your existing email address, but want to sanitize
out 99% of all the spam before it hits your inbox, get a filtering email
account from somewhere like SpamCop. You forward your email to the account
from your other addresses. Then you can pick up your clean email via POP,
IMAP or webmail. I personally prefer SpamCop's Filtered Email Service over
many others b/c SpamCop lets you scan your incoming email against 12
different real-time blocking lists. I know in my SpamCop protected email
addresses I get maybe 1 spam message every other day. But they block about
400 spams that were destined to me per day. 0Spam, Inboxer, and deSpammed
are other trusted providers.
G - If you run your own email server, use an email filter. There are many
blocklists out there which can dramatically cut the amount of spam you
receive. SpamCop is one, ORDB is another. There are bunches more. (See
this site for more info:
http://spam.abuse.net/adminhelp/mail.shtml)
4) Don't try to report the spam on your own. Use a tool like SpamCop,
SpamAbuse.org or Alert!Spam to help you. It can be quite difficult to
accurately finger the real sender of spam. Most novices mis-report 1/2 to
3/4 of the emails they try to report. That's an aweful lot of collateral
damage for minimal return. Plus most overzealously report real email and
get legitimate people and companies in needless trouble. (For more info,
visit:
http://spam.abuse.net/userhelp/)
Blocking spam in Outlook Express
So you’re tired of the spammers sending you email
trying to sell you Viagra, cable boxes, or banned CD’s. You seem to get the
same messages over and over again. You’ve tried Spam blockers and blocking
the senders, but they still keep coming.
Here is a little secret that defeats the spammer’s way
of sending junk mail to you.
In Outlook Express make sure the email you don’t want
to receive is highlighted.
Print it or note the email addresses of the other
people that received this same message. Do not copy the email addresses of
people you know. Just the ones you do not know.
Click on “Message” on the top toolbar. Then click on
“Create rule from message” below that.
By default the settings are checked in 1. Select the
Conditions for your rule: where it says “Where the from line contains
people”, uncheck this.
Place a check mark in “Where the To line contains
people”
In the second area box, “2. Select the Actions for your
rule:”, place a check mark in “Delete it”.
In the next area 3. “Rule Description (click on an
underlined value to edit it)”, click on contains people.
This opens another window that allows you to type in
the email addresses of the other people that got the same email. Spammers
generally send their junk out in groups. From your spam message type in the
other email addresses on the list and click add one by one. Do not enter
email addresses of other people you actually know.
When you have as many in the list as you can, click OK.
Now any spam (from a spammer’s list you are on that
these other people are on) will be deleted automatically. You won’t have to
do this too many times before you notice a significant difference.
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