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SPAM

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What is spam?

How CoastMS email servers handle SPAM

How do spammers get your email address?

DON'T DO THIS

DO THIS

What is spam?

Spam has no manners, knows no boundaries, and takes no prisoners. It makes you wring your hands in frustration, shake your fist with rage, and wear out your DELETE key and finger.

No one I talked to is really sure what the letters in "spam" stand for:

Actually, it stands for nothing — it's just unsolicited e-mail (commercial or otherwise) that comes to your Inbox in droves. How it was named "spam" is debated in countless newsgroups and Web sites on that oracle of misinformation we call the Internet. In other words, no one is really sure.

Unsolicited commercial e-mail, commonly called "spam" or junk e-mail, not only clutters our inboxes, but can also invade our lives with unwanted messages that may even deceive or disgust us. It's bad enough that spam wastes our bandwidth at the office. Even worse is knowing that junk e-mail may target our kids, grandchildren, and elderly relatives in their homes. The flow of unsolicited commercial e-mail can be slowed with advanced filtering and other new technology, but curbing spam also requires the combined action of computer users, industries, and government. You can take steps to help decrease your exposure to unwelcome messages:

How do spammers get your email address?

Simply put: You give it to them. Each time you send an online greeting card your email and the email address of the person you sent it to is added to the spammers list.  Whenever you enter a contest, register to receive something for free or participate in most chat rooms and discussion groups your email address is added to the spammers lists.

Turn OFF Read Receipt

Does your email package automatically confirm "Read Receipt" requests? If so, you could be giving spammers an easy way to confirm that your email address is valid. This tip is specific to the Microsoft Outlook email program, but the concept is applicable to virtually any email software.

You should make sure that this acknowledgement functionality is not configured to send a read receipt automatically, because that would validate your address to spammers. Here's the settings for controlling read receipt requests:

Tools > Options > Email Options button > Tracking Options > This setting should never be placed to 'Always send a response.'

Avoid replying to the sender

When you reply and type REMOVE in the subject line or click on their UNSUBSCRIBE link, this is a great way to let spammers know that yes, your e-mail address is up, running, and being used right now. It's like waving a white flag that says, "I read unsolicited e-mail. Please send more."

The best way to "opt out" of a spammer's mailing list is to pretend you never received the e-mail message. Put your hands over your ears and sing, "La-la-la-la...I can't HEAR you!" (No one likes to be ignored.)

Don't list yourself in Internet directories

This is a tough one. If you're in the regular phone book, chances are you're in one of the big directories such as BigFoot, AnyWho, InfoSpace, Switchboard, and Yahoo!. Look yourself up, and there you'll be. There is probably a place to add your e-mail address (for free, can you believe it?), but my advice is: Don't.

Don't participate in any Chain letters

To get rid of those pesky chain letters that promise all sorts of good luck, bad luck, good health, curses,  love, etc. you need to visit BreakTheChain.org. The folks running the site take time to look into the validity of each and every chain letter that has been submitted to the site. 99% are hoaxes.

Some others I've received concern needles in theater seats, free software from my boss, free cases of champagne, free trips to Disney World, a request for money for a little girl dying of a tropical disease, the Hawaiian good luck totem, caution using cell phones at gas stations, and my personal favorite: a virus warning about e-mail messages with "How to give a cat a colonic" in the subject line.

DON'T LET YOUR FRIENDS SPAM YOU AND DON'T SPAM YOUR FRIENDS

I really don't care to receive any forwarded messages/jokes/virus warnings or anything that says "forward this to everyone you know". The problems are:

Take me off you forwarding list. Don't feel like I'm picking on you. I have to send this message out about every few months to another friend that has gotten on the email forwarding kick. I've attached a few informative links about the subject.

Don't Bounce Messages back to a Spammer

The usual reason people like to bounce messages back to a spammer, is that they think a bounced message will tell the Spammer that an email account does not exist and their address will be removed from the spammer's database and therefore that they won't receive any more spam.

But in reality bounce messages are normally useless because:

  1. A Spammer sends, in a few minutes, millions of emails at once. Why should he spend time on deleting a few thousand addresses that do not exist? Usually the same addresses are spammed again next time (it does not cost the spammer any time or money, to send a few emails more).
  2. Bounces from users will only increase traffic over the internet and end up costing the user either time or money, to bounce back a lot of messages, back to the spammer.
  3. 99.9% of the spam, has an invalid return address that has nothing to do with the real spammer.

Here are a few "real world" examples:

When you want to fight against spam, you should read the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup and ask one of the experts there, how to fight back and how to avoid spam.

Ditch that clever profile

From an informal poll I took among friends, they told me that after they cleared their profile from a certain Internet service provider (that shall not be named), the amount of spam they received was drastically reduced.

Don't post your address on your Web page

Make sure your web page designer uses a picture of the address or a javascript that hides your address.

Report junk e-mail senders.

Most ISPs and e-mail services including AOL have a complaint address or Report Spam button to help eliminate junk e-mail from their systems. If you get unwanted mail, the sender's address will show the ISP name after the at sign (@). Forward the junk e-mail to the ISP's complaint address. Although many senders are outside the jurisdiction of the United States, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can take action against United States-based spammers and scammers.

The art of misdirection - Keep your primary address private - Create an alternate e-mail address

First, sign up for a free email account with hotmail or yahoo and use it to sign up for services so that your private account isn't bombarded with spam. Once that's taken care of, you need to put your friends in line and get them to stop sending chain letters, e-greetings and other cute address harvesting schemes. Then don't give out your primary e-mail address for any of the following:

Take the Pledge

My SPAM pledge: Under no circumstances will I ever buy anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited email message. Nor will I respond to or forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, blessings, curses, jokes or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.

Ignore spam

Spammers often combine names randomly with popular e-mail services (for example, MSN® Hotmail®, AOL, and Yahoo!) in hopes of finding valid e-mail addresses. By responding to the junk e-mail, even to unsubscribe, you may be inadvertently verifying that the message has reached a working e-mail address. Unless you are unsubscribing from a distribution list that you signed up for or you know the sender of the message, discard it without responding.

Review a Web site's privacy policy

Do it before doing business online. When you sign up for Web-based services such as online banking, shopping, or newsletters, review the privacy policy closely. Some sites will automatically assume the right to share your e-mail address with other organizations. Responsible sites will offer you a way to opt out. Make sure that you're checking all the privacy options you need to check. Sometimes these are hard to find, but they're there. And sometimes there is more than one box to check. Some sites assume the right to share your information; responsible sites will give you a way to opt out.

Never accept check boxes or tiny form fields on that page that are checked to indicate that you're fine with this company selling or giving away your e-mail address to "responsible" parties. Make sure you uncheck when necessary. In fact, backtrack through the pages and make sure you didn't forget to indicate your "don't-you-dare-sell-this-e-mail-address"  preference. Be careful when you do backtrack.  Sometimes sneaky vendors will set the pages to go back to the default setting, thereby tripping you up again.

Use an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that uses technology to help filters junk e-mail.

Some ISPs use technology to help filter junk e-mail before it reaches your inbox. MSN 8, Microsoft's subscription Internet access and content service, uses tools from Brightmail and Microsoft-developed filters that assist in blocking spam at the mail server. Most free email services also provide spam filtering and reporting. Yahoo! Mail recently improved its SpamGuard feature. Click here for full instructions on how to use it.

Alter your e-mail address when you post it

You might post your e-mail address sometimes to a newsgroup, chat room, or bulletin board. But you don't have to post it correctly. The funky term for this is "munging" your address. This means adding a character, number, or symbol (or two) that has to be taken out for your address to work (for example, "cr@bby@mi(rosft.com"). It really throws those automatic "address harvesters" (yikes, what a term!) off balance, and they just slink away from whence they came.

Make use of laws against spam

While anti-spam laws have not been enacted yet on the federal level, many states have adopted some sort of anti-spam legislation. A few examples:

While it's hard to know what to do with a piece of spam even if your state has laws against it, there is new legislation each year. Contact your senators and representatives to let them know how you feel about spam and ask them to oppose spam and to support legislation like the "Can Spam Act," which will help deter the practice of spamming. Eventually, if there is to be some peace in this world of e-mail, spammers will be prosecuted and you will stand victorious!

Set up filters that assist in blocking junk e-mail.

You can set up many e-mail programs to scan incoming mail for certain addresses or for phrases that are commonly used in junk and adult-content messages. You can have such messages automatically sent to the trash or to a specified folder.

Add-on SPAM filter programs

SpamPal is a simple, free, non-spyware, full version tool for detecting spam emails. It can be used by anyone with a Windows machine and a POP3 mailbox.  http://www.spampal.org  MailWasher is another you can use to set up a filter system for your email. Neither works with Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL. Both requires a bit of computer familiarity to set up.

Anytime you can keep from having another program sitting in memory hogging resources the better. Many prefer to setup their email program to do the filtering.

Use Outlook to filter SPAM (Wash your mail)

You can set Outlook's filters to color-code unwanted mail, place junk in special folder, or automatically send a specified type of message to your delete folder. The Junk mail filters let you assign rules on names, addresses, contents of incoming messages, and domain names such as "Sendmoney.dot."

Outlook can search for commonly used phrases in email messages and automatically move messages containing these phrases from your Inbox to either a junk email folder created by Outlook, to your Deleted Items folder, or to any other folder you specify. You can find the list of terms that Outlook uses to filter suspected junk email messages in a file called Filters.txt, located in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\LocaleID folder, where LocaleID is the locale identifier (LCID) for your installation of Microsoft Office. For example, the LCID for English - United States is 1033. For a list of LCIDs, see Microsoft Office Help.

You can also filter messages with a list of senders of junk and adult content email. As you receive unwanted email messages, you can create a list of the email addresses of these senders.

When you first begin using these features or when you make modifications to them, you may want to review messages that are automatically removed from the Inbox to make sure that any wanted messages are not accidentally removed.

Follow Outlook's step-by-step guide. The information below is from the Microsoft Office Assistance Center.

To automatically move junk mail from your Inbox

  1. On the standard toolbar, click Organize.
  2. Click Junk Email.
  3. In the bulleted items for Junk and for Adult Content messages, in each of the first lists, click Move. When you click move, the second list on each line will change from a list of colors to a list of folder destinations.
  4. You can leave the default destination (Junk Email), click Deleted Items, or click Other folder and choose or create one.
  5. Click Turn On to enable the feature.
  6. Repeat steps 3 through 5 for both the Junk and Adult Content lines.

In addition to using the built-in Outlook filters, you can create custom rules to filter out specific types of unwanted messages. Custom rules include additional words or phases that are not included in the Filters.txt file. Just as with the built-in feature, you can specify that the rules you create move messages from your Inbox to the Junk Email folder, to your Deleted Items folder, or to any other folder you specify.

To create custom rules

On the Tools menu, click Rules Wizard, and then follow the instructions on your screen.

To add email senders to the junk email list

  1. Click Inbox.
  2. Select a message, and then right-click it.
  3. Point to Junk Email, and then click Add to Junk Senders list or Add to Adult Content Senders list.

To review or delete Email senders on your junk email list

  1. On the standard toolbar, click Organize.
  2. Click Junk Email
  3. Click the underlined phrase, click here.
  4. In the second bulleted item, click Edit Junk Senders or Edit Adult Content Senders. You can review, add, edit, or delete entries from the list.

Additional links:

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Stay informed

Groups fighting unsolicited commercial e-mail operate Web sites to share information about their efforts to reduce the clutter in everyone's inbox. These groups include:

Here are some online resources you can use to help reduce spam:

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