Unwanted Spam Attacks

Annoying Junk Email and how to avoid it.

By Dana Greenlee, Co-Host WebTalkGuys Radio

Are you interested in visiting a porn website? Do you want to buy Cipro or Viagra online?

If you have an email address, it’s almost a certainty that you have received unsolicited emails offering services or products that you have no interest in. Unwanted emails (called spam) sent to your personal email address is annoying and a serious invasion of privacy.

If you're among the 90 % of Net users who get sent at least one piece of spam a week, you may also know that spam is expensive. Connecting to the Net to download junk email costs people millions of dollars a year worldwide.

Are you aware of how much your personal email address is worth to marketers? Anyone can buy CD-ROMs containing thousands of email addresses for as little as $30. The irony is that, perhaps because I operate LoudVox.com, an online service business, I personally receive at least an email each week trying to sell me lists of other people’s email addresses.

How do spammers get hold of our personal email addresses? One method is to scan Usenet newsgroups and other public forums for email addresses. Another way is to guess email addresses that use AOL and Hotmail.

Avoiding all spam is just about impossible. However, there are a number of things you can do to substantially reduce your exposure to it.

If you jealously guard your email address, filter your incoming mail, report all spam, boycott services promoted by spam and never, ever believe the removal instructions on a spam email, you should notice a substantial reduction in the amount of junk email you receive.

Following are suggestions to getting yourself out of spam hell. If you want more detailed information, take a look at http://spam.abuse.net:

1) Most spam includes some sort of "Removal Instructions". Typically this involves sending an email to some address or typing your email address into a form. Never reply to the email list removal address or visit a “remove my email address” page within commercial spam emails. Guess what? This just confirms that your email address is active. This makes it more valuable to bulk spammers who can sell your address for more money, and you just end up getting more junk mail. Never, ever follow the removal instructions.

2) Be aware some sites pre-check opt-in email subscriptions to emails. Read all of the fine print and uncheck boxes on forms that allow you to opt-in and opt-out of promo emails.

3) Don't contribute to the problem for others by sending out large group emails to many other people with everyone’s email address visible in the “To” or “CC” line. You can hide their email addresses from others by using the ”BCC” (Blind carbon copy) line instead.

4) Keep your personal email account very personal. Don't give it out to everyone. Only give it to your family, friends and business contacts. Then ask all of your contacts not to openly CC you to others, use BCC, because the email address is hidden from the view on the email.

5) Be careful about where you leave your email address. When you have to publish your email address, like in message boards or on sign-up web forms, get one free web-based email account, like hotmail.com or email.com, to use when you have to share your email address with a company.

6) Let the spammers know that you will never use their product. If they've left a toll-free phone number, call it - and tell them at length what you don’t like about their practices. The longer you talk, the more it costs them.

7) It is also important to report all spam you receive. Usually, the "from" address on spam is forged. You need to trace through the headers to figure out where the spam came from and who to complain to. You can use a service such as Spamcop to do this automatically.

8) Filtering incoming mail is possible thanks to a number of products such as Brightmail, Spam Hater, and Spam Buster. These programs analyze your incoming mail and attempt to figure out which is genuine email and which is spam. You can decide whether to divert spam to its own folder so you can double-check it, or just have it deleted automatically.

9) Lastly, if you use Microsoft Outlook for your email program, then delete the spam emails by setting it to delete them automatically. In Outlook click “Tools”, then select “Rules Wizard” and set the email program to delete spam. Just follow the wizard.

If you use Microsoft’s’ Outlook Express 6 instead, the steps are as follows:

1) Click TOOLS
2) Click MESSAGE RULES
3) Select and Click MAIL or BLOCKED SENDERS LIST
4) If you select MAIL then you can create rules or filters within Outlook Express to automatically delete spam.

5) If you selected BLOCKED SENDERS LIST then just add the from addresses of the spam messages you keep getting. Then the program will automatically delete or you can specify only certain email addresses to receive messages from and all the rest get deleted.

WTG

Listen to the audio version during the show:
51 min @ 20K Stream.
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(Dana Greenlee is president of LoudVox.com and co-host of the WebTalkGuys Radio Show. WebTalkGuys, a Washington-based talk show features technology news and interviews. It is broadcast on CNET Radio in San Francisco and Boston, on the web at CNET Radio, WebTalkGuys Radio and via the XM satellite network. Past show and interviews are also webcast via the Internet at http://www.webtalkguys.com).