Spam
"The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on." (Anon)
What Is Spam?
Junk mail.
Spam is the electronic equivalent of junk mail and is normally sent out, in bulk, to large numbers of people by individuals, or companies, who are simply using enormous lists of email addresses. The people who do this sort of thing are called "spammers" and most don't care if they are creating a nuisance by filling up mailboxes with unwanted junk. They work on the law of averages - send out enough of this rubbish and you'll get a few people to buy from you and, since email is very cheap to send out - even in very large quantities - they can afford to send out thousands of these emails every day.
Using Email Addresses Wisely
The first rule in dealing with spam is NEVER RESPOND!
Don't ask to be taken off a spammer's mailing list.
- They won't bother
- You're simply confirming your address.
Lists of valid email addresses are a lot easier to sell on, so this is one way of ensuring that your address ends up on a lot more hands.
There is nothing personal about this: spammers neither know nor care who you are. Most addresses are "harvested" from the Internet by software robots and sold by the million. Some are "discovered" by trying every combination of words and letters that could be expected to appear in front of @hotmail.com - a process that takes months. Either way, once you have made it onto one list, it's just a matter of time before you are on 5, 10, 50 or 1,000...
If your email address is a shiny new one, think twice before using it to sign up to various web sites. Far better to set up a second (possibly disposable) email address for indiscriminate use and keep your personal address for personal emails only. That way you may be able to sort out genuine emails from junk at a later date.
SpamCon and SneakMail offer DEAs that can be used for posting to Usenet newsgroups and similar purposes.
Viewing Spam
If you use an email program that allows you to 'preview' the contents of emails, turn the preview off!
Not only does this act as a measure of protection from malicious scrips in email, you can also select and delete spam without seeing the contents and without giving messages the chance to ask to dial out or download anything from a website.
Most spam is pretty easy to spot. Try configuring your email program to remove everything that has no Subject line, or where the Subject line is all in caps (FOR YOUR ATTENTION), or just contains your email address.
Initially, I suggest you don't automatically configure your email client to delete this mail immediately. Instead, set up a new mail folder called 'Junk' or 'Spam' and configure your email client to move all suspect email there. You can the check the contents at a later date (no preview, though - remember!) and pull out any genuine emails that have been mis-filed and dump the rest unread.
Mail Filters
There are at least four ways to filter your mail.
1. Signing up for a filtered mailbox. Technically, Hotmail and Yahoo fall into this category, since they let you set up a junk mail folder to hold spam. The problem is that their filtering is not very good and Hotmail, especially, is itself the target for very large amounts of spam. Better, free, services are offered by SpamCon and MyRealBox,.
2. Choose an ISP who offer spam filtering software as standard such as SpamAssassin. Whilst you can also run SpamAssassin on a local computer, at the current time, it is not yet fully available for Windows computers.
3. Install additional filtering software such as Mailwasher or SpamPal. Filtering with Mailwasher is a two stage process. You run Mailwasher first, to scan your mailboxes and get a list of subject lines. You can then decide which messages to delete and which to download; you can also "bounce" unwanted email to suggest that your mailbox is not working. However, I would recommend that you are cautious about using the latter option as spammers will frequently forge From email addresses and your bounces could end up flooding the mailbox of a totally innocent user.
4. Use, or configure, options within your own email client to
remove some spam for you.
You should be able to find further
information on how to do this in the sites listed below:
- Pegasus 4.11 Content Filtering
- Spam blocking in Mozilla 1.3
- Eudora spam filtering
- Mail filtering in Outlook and Outlook Express
More Anti-Spam Resources
- SpamPal
- Downloadable free software that can flag up dubious emails based on criteria that you set. You can then get OE to dump any flagged messages into a Junk folder which you empty every now and then.
- MailWasher
- A downloadable spam filtering system. The free version has all the tools you need to setup basic filtering.
- RiskFreeMail
- An online email service with its own spam filtering system. The idea behind this is that you re-direct all of your own email to your RiskFreeMail account and use their spam filtering (which you configure to your specifications) to remove the junk. You can then collect the remaining emails as usual.
- SpamFilter
- A freely downloadable spam remover