What is spam?
Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited
commercial e-mails (UCE), the form of junk mail known popularly
as "spam".
Some are simply broadcast advertising messages while other
spam mails may contain viruses, trojan houses (known simply
as trojans) or inviting links to potentially harmful web
pages.
Some users see spam as a minor annoyance, while others
are so overwhelmed with unwanted mail that they are forced
to switch e-mail addresses. This has led many Internet users
to wonder: "how
did these people get my e-mail address
?"
Spammers get your email address from potentially anywhere
you make your address public, or from trojan programs
running on infected computers which can harvest all email
addresses in an address book and send them to email harvesters.
If you reply to spam, especially using any 'unsubscribe'
link then watch out. If you follow their instructions to
remove yourself, you've just verified that you're attentive
and responsible, and that your email address is valid. They
can now sell your email address to other spammers as a "verified
address".
Most people simply delete spam unread, but it may have cost
you money in call charges to download the email and now your
time is being wasted having to delete it. So how to deal
with and reduce the amount of spam email coming into your
mail box? These are a few tips, but the action taken by individuals
varies with their on-line skills and how much spam annoys
them.
1. Never use the opt-out facility on spam mail. This address
(if it is a real one) usually links to an email harvesting
site. The fact that a reply comes from your address tells
the email harvester that your address is a live one - and
that you actually read the spam! That makes your address
more saleable!!!
2. Do not simply reply to spam. Usually the mail header
and the 'from' address are heavily disguised to make it difficult
for recipients to see where the mail came from. In over 95%
of cases the reply to or from address is forged, and may
be the live address of someone totally unconnected to the
spam. Why do spammers disguise the mail headers? Because
the sending of UCE is forbidden by most Internet Service
Providers and their accounts or web sites could be closed
down if their misconduct was reported.
2. Use a mail filtering service such as that provided by
SpamCop (www.spamcop.net). Here is a facility that can actually
analyse the email header and determine the actual source
of the message. Usually you will see that the mail comes
via a server in China. Pakistan, Brazil etc. More importantly
SpamCop can send out emails reporting the spammer to their
Internet Service Provider. However, there is a charge for
the use of SpamCop.
3. Use a server based pre-filtering system such as MailFoundry.
This is used for the sites we host and
is excellent. It uses special mailservers which
check incoming mail for known spam and viruses. These are
deleted before getting anywhere near your own mailserver.
Mail seen as OK is forwarded direct to your mailbox and mail
which looks like spam but may just be something you need
to see is held in MailFoundry and a digest of such mail is
sent to your mailbox once a day allowing you to check that
they are indeed spam and giving the opportuniy to release
the held mail for reading. There is no additional charge
for the system in our hosting packages. See KeswickWeb.
3. Set up your email software to filter out spam. Most email
software can be set up to filter out and delete emails containing
certain words or coming from certain domains. You could,
for example, filter out all mail containing the word 'viagra'
or coming from mailserver domains ending .cn (China) or .ru
(Russia). In order for the filter to be applied the mail
still has to be downloaded. Not all spam mail will be detected
by such filtering as spammers work hard to bypass filters,
and it does require some understanding of software to set
the filters up. Probably the easiest spam filters to set
up are those in ThunderBird.
4. Use a mail pre-filter. These screen the mail on your
mailserver and compare the mail headers and content with
the spam records which are found in on-line databases. The
pre-filter can be configured to delete the mail on the server
and then start up your mail client software to download the
mail you really want to see! One advantage of this is that
the pre-filter will also pick out emails containing viruses
so these can be prevented from reaching your computer. An
example of such a filter is Mailwasher (see MailWasher
Pro) which has been
developed with ease of use in mind and can also be used for
screening Hotmail and AOL mail.
Mailwasher checks the mail
on the mailserver, before it is downloaded to your computer,
and using filters identifies which messages are known to
be spam, which ones may be spam and which appear to be
benign. It can also identify the messages carrying the
most common viruses. The message titles and senders' addresses
are displayed so that you have control over which messages
are blocked and those which I wish to read. Then a single
mouse click causes the unwanted mail to be deleted from
the mailserver, and the wanted mail to be downloaded into
your usual mail program to be read in the normal manner.
This is far, far quicker than downloading all mail and
then having to wade through the spam to find the messages
you actually need to read. MailWasher is available on a
30 day trial basis (it costs just $37.00 to buy) and can
be downloaded from here
Ideally you should now use a webhost with good built-in
spam protection, such as one using MailFoundry such
as we use for
our client websites.
To read about virus protection click here.
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