Avoiding Spam
This being the first column, I'll begin with a subject dear to the time-clocks of many people who spend time online - fighting spam.
No, I'm not talking about doing battle with tins of low-grade meat, but about stemming the tide of junk e-mail flooding many inboxes.
Any commercial message which is unrequested , or from somebody you have had no prior contact with, can be classed as spam.
Spam now accounts for more than 60% of email traffic, up from around 42% a year ago, and between one and eight per cent of it contains viruses, according to spambusters Brightmail.
It's time-consuming and annoying enough to drive some mail administrators to vent their spleen in auto-generated notices to suspected spammers, or senders of Unsoliticed Bulk Email (UBE) -
"SHOULD We determine that you ARE, in Fact, a Sender of UBE, we will rise up enflamed and drive you away with whips and scourges and see to it that you see no peace, the rest of your days, wandering hungry and cold, cursed by all who know you and unforgiven for your abuses ... "
Apart from that, let's see what can you do, as someone who doesn't want email about having your bits enlarged, becoming a millionaire by working from home, cheap loans, repairing your credit, Nigerian money laundering, adult entertainment websites, or pyramid sales schemes..
Many ISPs ( Internet Service Providers ), including the three largest, offer effective free filtering services, which block junk email at their servers, before it even reaches you. These should be used.
Next, run filter programmes on your computer, which prevent spam from reaching your inbox by deleting or bouncing it from your ISP's server. I use Mailwasher , but a recent magazine article recommended Ella . Both are free with advertising, and cost $US29.95 without.
After this, dealing with spam is an exercise in both preventing the spread of your address to more spammers' lists, and slowing down or managing its flow to your inbox. These steps will help protect your address;
- Sign up to services using a 'dummy' email address such as one provided by Yahoo.com, or sneakemail.com, and set it to forward your email. When the dummy starts receiving spam, change it.
- Be wary of posting a raw email address on web pages, publicly archived email lists, or forums, where it becomes a target for address harvesting software.
- When giving your email address in a web form, look for a guarantee that it won't be sold, and watch for obscure check-boxes which sign you up for 'email offers' or the like.
These measures in your email reader will help to manage spam, and prevent a trickle from becoming a torrent;
- DON'T reply to spam. Doing so only confirms your email address.
- Use filtering on your email reader, for example Outlook Express ( OE ). In OE, you can block email with attachments, or from certain addresses, by choosing Mail in the Tools --> Message Rules menu. The
, Tools --> Options menu'Security' tab, has anti-virus settings, and choosing plain text as the Mail Sending Format under the 'Send' tab may also help.
- Close OE's preview pane under the View --> Layout menu. Some emails contain code which relays a message to the originating computer when it is opened or previewed.
- OE can't block emails in the HTML format which is often used by spammers and virus-senders, so try a mail reader which can. The new reader can be run alongside your existing reader, and be set to 'leave messages on server' while you try it out.
Happy hunting.
March 1, 2004
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