Cut out the spam E-mails

[Happyolddog]

7 Tips to Help You Reduce or Stop Spam

1. Use a separate email address when you post messages to any public forum, such as newsgroups and mailing lists. Never use your personal email address for this purpose -- or you'll be flooded with spam. Then, you can quickly go through the email in this account to see what's spam and what isn't. And your main personal email address won't be as clogged with spam.

For example, AOL users can set up a special user name for free, and use that for their postings. Then, they can just discontinue that account if they start to get too much spam.

2. Consider acquiring multiple email addresses for different purposes. This helps you to identify different sources and senders, and lets you filter more effectively.

For instance, you may have one for personal use only by friends, family or colleagues that is never used to request information or to subscribe to newsletters, discussion lists, etc.

Another might be used just for sales inquiries or orders, or for making online purchases. This can be arranged through your ISP, web host or through any number of online email service providers.

Even free mail services like Yahoo! Mail and GMail can be used for this purpose.

3. You can subscribe to services online that provide you with disposable addresses that can be deleted if they begin to attract spam messages.

You can create a unique address for each email newsletter or forum you subscribe to. Then, when an email address begins getting spam, you 'throw it away' and start using another email address.

This works because the disposable email addresses actually forward to a real email address of yours. The software lets you track which addresses are getting spam, and you can just resubscribe using a new, spam-free address.

For information on what you need to know about disposable addresses, visit:
http://email.about.com/library/weekly/aa072002a.htm

Our favorite company that offers disposable email accounts is Sneakemail. It even has a free version:
http://sneakemail.com

4. Remove your email address from your website. If you list or link to your email address, you can expect to be spammed.

Address-harvesting robots will spider your site and extract them. So remove them wherever possible and use web-based forms instead. This will drastically cut down the amount of spam you receive if you have a website.

5. NEVER buy anything from a company that spams. Don't visit their sites or ask for more information. (If you respond to their spams, you're encouraging them to continue spamming -- they only need a tiny fraction of responses to be profitable.)

There's another reason not to buy anything from a company that spams: over 95% of spam offers are scams! In fact, not responding to spam is the single most effective way to not get scammed on the Internet.

6. Filter your email. Using filters is key to managing your email effectively. It may take a short time to figure out how to do this, but it's definitely worthwhile.

For more anti-spam filtering information, visit:
http://email.about.com/cs/spamfiltering/

For more on negative spam filtering, visit:
http://email.about.com/library/howto/htnegativespamfilter.htm

7. Consider subscribing to a spam prevention service. We're not enthusiastic about these services, but many people find them invaluable. They range from the good to the bad to the downright ugly, and from free to fee-based.

Many of these services are "challenge response" services. This means they require that people who send you email to respond by clicking, visiting a website, and/or typing in a code that only a human (not a spam bot) could do correctly.

Unfortunately, many people -- and most newsletter publishers -- simply refuse to participate. That's because it requires people who are sending you legitimate email to take THEIR time to ensure YOU get email.

In fact, many of us consider it rude for you to even ask.

Imagine a newsletter publisher like ScamBusters with 100,000+ subscribers. If even 20% installed this kind of system, that would mean the publisher would have 20,000 challenge/response requests. If each took only half a minute, that would be 167 hours -- or more than four weeks to reply!

Not very likely...

Tip: Make sure that any software or system you select gives YOU control of which email you get (and doesn't automatically erase messages).

On a related note, safeguard your newsletter and discussion list subscriptions. If you, your ISP or web host use spam filters or white lists, be sure to let them know that you want to receive messages from any newsletters or discussion lists that you subscribe to.

Do it as soon as you sign up... otherwise, it's very easy not to notice that you're not receiving them.

While these 7 tips may not actually stop spam, they will certainly help you drastically reduce the amount of spam you get.
Other Excellent Stop Spam Resources

CAUCE: Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
The online anti-spam organization. Their list of anti-spam resources is probably the best around.
http://www.cauce.org/about/resources.shtml

What Is Spam (And What Isn't)?
An insightful article by Walter Daniels on defining spam.

The Fine Line Between Legitimate E-Mail Marketing And Spam.
Some great info from Clifford Kurtzman, President of Tenagra Corp.

Spamprimer.com
Our friend Randy Cassingham has an excellent site devoted to getting rid of spam and other email 'pests.'
http://www.spamprimer.com/

Abuse.net
Includes a good description of how to complain to the spammer's provider.
http://spam.abuse.net/spam/

Junkbusters.com
Excellent links, resources, and news on how to reduce and perhaps almost stop spam.
http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/junkemail.html

Good Luck,
Hod...Liam..

[Paule]

The Key To Beating Spam

Unsolicited junk mail is one of the biggest problems faced by Internet users everyday. We have spam filters keeping spam out of our mailboxes, but these filters are far from perfect and many legitimate e-mails are filtered as spam because of this. So what exactly is the true key to beating spam?

Spammers have changed their tactics a lot over the last few years and the amount of spam circulating the Internet is rising at an alarming rate. The vast diversity of spam messages and different techniques used by spammers make it hard to identify spam accurately, whether it is a human being or a computer program doing the identification. Identifying spam will not have a direct impact on the amount of spam distributed each day, but over a long period of time it can make spam an ineffective method of marketing. Spammers continue to distribute unsolicited bulk e-mails because it works and they need active readers to make it work. If nobody read their e-mails anymore they will have no reason for wasting their time on unresponsive recipients, except for the lunatics who like sending junk e-mails for no reason at all.

Spammers link to remote images or JavaScript from within their e-mails to track their performance. These linked objects are loaded from a server each time a recipient opens one of their e-mails. They monitor the logs of these servers to see how many times the images or scripts were loaded, which will effectively give them a good indication of how many times their e-mails were opened. If they continue to see activity from these linked objects, they will continue sending spam. An e-mail client like Thunderbird can be configured to block remote images in e-mails. Images embedded into the e-mail or images sent as attachments, will still be displayed, because embedded and attached images cannot send tracking information to the sender. Blocking remote images will not cause any discomfort while reading legitimate e-mails, all remote images in a legitimate e-mail can easily be unblocked with the click of a button. Disabling JavaScript in your e-mail client is not a bad idea either, very few legitimate e-mails use JavaScript so you will not miss a thing by disabling it. In fact, it is anyway safer reading e-mails without the execution of JavaScript. By blocking images and disabling JavaScript you make it impossible for spammers to monitor the performance of their e-mails.

The main reason why spammers embed images into their e-mails instead of using text, is to bypass the spam filters. Certain phrases within the text of an e-mail may trigger a spam filter, but spam filters cannot read the contents of an image, so it is perfectly safe to put the text inside an image and embed the image into an e-mail. This worked for a while until spam filters started to flag these messages as spam. Spammers started to add random text from various books at the end of their e-mails to fool the spam filters. Spam filters cannot read the text of an e-mail in context with the rest of the e-mail, so e-mails containing an image and some senseless text at the end, may appear perfectly legitimate to most spam filters. Spammers also add CAN-SPAM banners and fake unsubscribe links in their e-mails to make it appear as legitimate and compliant with anti-spam legislation. Anyone can add a CAN-SPAM banner to an e-mail and the only purpose of the unsubscribe link is to confirm that your mailbox is active. You may believe that you will be removed from their list by clicking on the unsubscribe link, but that will only cause your e-mail address to be moved to their priority list and you will be exposed to even more spam.

Links in spam e-mails normally contain affiliate or tracking codes. The affiliate code will only be beneficial to the spammer if you buy something from the web site referred by the link. You should never buy anything from a web site referred by a spam e-mail, not even a well-known and trustworthy site. You always run the risk of becoming a victim of a phishing attack. Links containing tracking data may be linked to your e-mail address and can have the same effect as a fake unsubscribe link. Sophisticated spammers can create a unique link connected to the e-mail address of each e-mail they send out, so they can easily confirm that your e-mail account is active when you click on one of those links.

So what is the bottom line of all this? To battle spam effectively, you need to ignore it. But you can only ignore it if you are able to identify it. Identifying spam often means that you need to open the e-mail. Opening the e-mail may cause tracking information to be sent to a server (through remote images or JavaScript), informing the spammer that your mailbox is active or the information may be used to monitor the effectiveness of the e-mail. To prevent this tracking information from being sent you need to disable JavaScript and block remote images with your e-mail client. Links provided in these e-mails should never be trusted and you should never click on any of them.

Ignoring spam does not mean you should not report it. Ignoring spam simply means that you should not respond to the spam like the spammer would like you to do. Making spam less effective for the spammer and reporting it to the appropriate authorities is the crucial key to beating spam.

Report Spam