Things I have Done to Reduce E-mail Spam
Over the years, my email spam problems have fluctuated up and down. It is a sad see-saw of competing techniques between us frustrated recipient-victims, and the spammers - the lowest form of ignorant, obnoxious, scum of the earth.
Everyone's situation will be different, depending on how they read their email, what their service provider provides, how they use the internet, and how technically knowledgeable they are. What I do will not apply to everyone, but I have had some success, and you might get some good ideas. So here goes - my Anti-Spam Top 10 List:
Many services that provide you with an email address, also offer one or more aliases that you set up. These are also sometimes called "disposable addresses". An alias is simply another address that points to the same mailbox. If my address was awelch@xyznosuchthing.com, then I might create an alias of andrew@xyznosuchthing.com. Mail sent to either address would go to the same place. Ask your internet service provider how you can do this.
The key is to reveal only the ALIAS to your correspondents, and keep the base address (which is more difficult to change) to yourself. If you start getting a lot of spam sent to your alias address, you can simply change your alias and inform all of your correspondents - no need to change service providers.
The idea of a dynamic alias is a bit more work but works even better. Make your alias something like andrew_in_2006@xyznosuchthing.com. Every December 31 you change the alias to the new year! You can remind everyone of the annual change in your Christmas letter. Even if they forget, they will soon figure it out when the email bounces back! Spammers, on the other hand, use automation that is not as smart.
By now, most people are familiar with the CC (Carbon Copy) field when sending emails. (Copies of the email go to each address that you put in the CC list.) Sadly, especially with people that circulate 'jokes' and 'email humour', fewer people seem to know or use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field. Putting an address in the BCC field means that that person gets a copy, but their email address does not appear in anyone else's copy.
The bottom line is simply this - people love to Forward emails - especially the 'humourous' ones. When folks use CC instead of BCC, all of those accumulated email addresses go far and wide. And you start getting Viagra offers.
Not all email programs display the BCC field by default, but they all have one. Find out where yours is.
I have recently had some success using the Rules Wizard in MS Outlook. There is also a less sophisticated version available in MS Outlook Express.
The Rules Wizard guides you through redirecting email based on sender, recipient, subject, and/or content. I redirect a lot of email straight into my Trash box. Rule filters are why spammers send you stuff with words like "Genu1ne Univers1ty Degr@e". Fortunately, that actually makes it easier for you to redirect emails with such content - legitimate emails don't spell things that way!
The trick is to spot some patterns and then to defeat them. Instead of always deleting new spam right away, I actually have a Spam folder where I accumulate it for a while and then scan through it looking for patterns that I can add to my rules filters. Yes, it takes a bit of time, but I figure I come out ahead, and I love it when Outlook safely and automatically trashes the spam without my having to see it. "Take that, you bastards..."
I'll try to put together an appendix of my current most successful rules soon.
Keep Addresses off the Internet
Web sites are probably the number one address source for spammers. You might think you don't have a web site, so you can skip this step. Think again.
Anyone who knows some of the subtle tricks of Google, knows that you can find all kinds of stuff out there that you might not have expected. Chat room conversations, for instance, kept in some temporary storage place for a while. Emails that you thought were private. Newsletter articles with your by-line. Company documents stored as PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files. If there is an email to be found, those spamming parasitic filth will find it and sell it.
The long and short of it is don't post your email address ANYWHERE. Period. Some people try to get around this by posting their email address as franksmith-at-hotmail-dot-com. That usually does the trick, but spammers may start looking for those too.
Keep Addresses off your Web Site
Keeping spam out is toughest for folks, like me, who regularly get valid email from total strangers. It is even worse if you want to encourage this (as a business, for example) by publicizing your email on a web page. The good news is that there are relatively safe ways to do this.
The first trick is to use the franksmith-at-hotmail-dot-com technique, mentioned above.
The second trick is to show surfers a picture of your email, instead of posting it as text. Simply capture a screen shot of the email address as text, use paintbrush to crop out just that address part, and then put that picture on your page where the text would normally go. Here's what it looks like (try selecting it):
awelch@
The third trick is to either avoid automating "send me email", or do it in such a way that spammers cannot get your address. Lots of web pages have a place to click which runs the command mailto: awelch@xyznosuchthing. Since the command itself is stored as text within the HTML. spammers will easily find it. Instead of using the "mailto:" function directly, you can insert a button that runs a small function. This function reproduces the mailto function, but builds up the address as a series of characters, rather than leaving it as a literal in the HTML text. (My contact pages use this functionality if you want to look at a real life example.) The function looks like this:
function emailer()
{
NewWin = window.open("mail" + "to:johnqpublic" + "@" + "domain.com")
}
The spammer's tools are very unlikely to be able to figure out an address from the above.
Many spam filters are having a tougher time these days figuring out if a message coming to you is spam or ham (the term for legitimate messages that are not spam but might get flagged as spam). With some internet service providers, you can help their filter system by maintaining a white list on your account. A white list is (not surprisingly) the opposite of a black list, and is a list of email addresses that you recognize as belonging to people that you correspond with. When the spam filter is unsure about a message, it will not flag it as spam if the sender is someone on your white list. Hotmail is a good example of a service that uses this feature extensively.
I discussed dynamic aliases up above. Your email account provider may or may not support one or more aliases that you can define and use. If you have your own web domain (like me at www.intellact.ca, you typically have multiple email inboxes and unlimited aliases for each.
Sooner or later, you are going to be asked to give out your email address for one thing or another, to be stored in some account somewhere. Instead of giving out your primary address, give them an alias which you can easily change if necessary. Personally, I create aliases for practically every different use of email. If Air Canada wants my email address, they get aircanada@
If I ever get spam coming into that address, I can easily go into my Air Canada account, change the email address to a new alias, and delete the old one, without having to notify any other correspondents. I also know to go directly to Air Canada to complain about the abuse of my email address from their records.
This tip is an add-on to the use of multiple aliases. If you are using a mail tool like Microsoft Outlook, you should create email accounts for each alias that you send mail out under on a regular basis. That way, the reply-to email address is set as the appropriate alias.
Here's a useful rule-of-thumb: If you specifically subscribed to an email newsletter or other regular notification, then it is probably safe to unsubscribe. It is not a good idea to follow any unsubscribe instructions for spam. If they were going to respect that kind of request, they would not be sending out spam in the first place! All you are doing if you 'unsubscribe' is telling the scum who mail this trash that this address gets through to someone, and that you actually read the stuff! Never respond to spam. Period.
Finally,spread the word about how to fight spam. You can refer your correspondents to here (http://www.intellact.ca/apwelch/soapbox.htm), or pass on tips that work for you. You can only control one side of where and how your email address is used. If you don't educate your friends and colleagues, you will be offered Hot Stock Tips and Herbal Viagra in no time.
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