Millions of pieces of Spam
Posted by Dana Camp on March 21, 2008 in Email, TimeSavers
One of the issues facing many of our clients is Spam. It is an aggravating time waster, and in many cases, there is little we can directly do about it. The best way of fighting Spam is to understand it so that you can avoid it, and then be smart about removing the rest.
Spam is a generic term for unsolicited messages, getting it’s origin from a Monty Python sketch. “millions of pieces of Spam”. It creeps into our inbox trying to get us to buy products, view specific websites, or anything else that can be commercialized. The occasional virus may still find it’s way to you as well. Spam doesn’t appear randomly, you may have been added to a mailing list by entering your email address on a less reputable site. Some free websites sell their member lists to offset their costs, and other sites exist for the soul purpose of collecting email addresses. Tools similar to what search engines use also help Spammers in their effort. They will gather anything that resembles an email address on a given site, and any other site that it may link to. In short, if your email address appears on a web page in plain text, you may start getting spam. One source, often forgotten, is chain emails. Some email chains have hundreds of addresses attached to it, making a spammer’s job easy.
Avoiding it:
Like the flu, avoiding it is much better than trying to get rid of it. Here are a few tips to keep a clean box spam-free.
1) Create a separate email address that can be used on the Internet for anything that requires registration for some “free” service, or to get more information about a product. Use this address for any sites that are questionable. This includes lesser known online merchants, online bulletin boards, forums, newsgroups to name a few. Some safe places to use email will include your bank, Major companies which you have an existing account with, and government websites.
2) Use the check boxes during online account creation for “email opt-out”. Often the check box will be in favor of sending email. Read the wording and choose whichever option sends the fewest possible messages, sometimes no messages at all.
3) Take a few seconds before you forward that chain email to clean it up some. When viewing the original message, copy the actual content into a new email, leaving the addresses behind. This makes the message cleaner, and will actually protect the addresses in the original message more than you. If you friends “downstream” do the same, your chances of your email being seized by a spammer are much smaller.
4) If you have a website, use a dedicated email address on that site, as opposed to your primary message, or an online response form which generates an email automatically.
Handling Spam:
Some items which you believe are Spam are easy to stop. Any reputable company will remove your address if you ask them to. Are you getting emails from Apple or WalMart? Maybe you get them from Bank of America. If the name isn’t familiar to you, you can run a web search using a major search engine to learn more about the company.
Check the suspect message for directions to remove yourself from the mailing list. Only follow these directions for reputable companies. Spammers also use this as another trick to gather email addresses.
Many other messages may still be flooding your inbox at this point. If you use a client (a program like Outlook, Outlook express, Thunderbird, or MacMail, They nay have mail filtering capabilities. This cannot stop spam completely, but is a big step forward. Unfortunately, spammers seemed to be engaged in an arms race with IT professional and program developers. Spammers want to keep spreading their message, and everyone else wants to keep your inbox clean.
Talk with your website host. If you have your own website, and your email address is associated with your site, then your webhost will likely have control over your email server as well. Each host is different, but they will let you know what options you have if spam is a major issue for you. Moving your email to a more secure server, or enabling block lists to help keep junk mail out.
Some more resources may be found below:
Comment
Log in or Register to post a comment.