Everyone who has email has received spam of some kind by now.
Spam comes in many forms, some that are obvious and some less so.
Unknowingly, you may even be guilty of spamming. As the volume
of spam increases, it becomes more important for all of us to be
cognizant of what we can do to fight back. This page aims to provide
essential information on Spam and the tools available to fight
it.
What
is SPAM?
Technically, SPAM (TM) is a potted meat product, invented by Hormel
Foods, Inc. in 1937. The word was originally adopted as slang
for unsolicited commercial
email (UCE). It is now commonly extended to several varieties
of email and newsgroup abuse, loosely categorized by using the
Internet to deliver inappropriate messages to unwilling recipients.
Hormel Foods has posted its admirable position on UCE and the
use of the word "spam" on the Web at http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm.
What can I do to stop myself from getting
Spam?
Today, there is no way to
stop spam. However, the flood can be reduced to a trickle with
a little effort. We still need changes in the law to make spamming
illegal, changes in ISP behaviour - they can filter email before
it reaches users - but free software like Mailwasher can make a
real difference.
The
first step in dealing with spam is to discourage users from responding
to it. Maybe there is only one mug in a million, but if a spammer
can send out 100m spams for nothing, it can still be a profitable
business. And don't ask to be taken off a spammer's mailing list:
it will simply confirm your address is a live one and will be
added to more mailing lists of verified addresses.
There is nothing personal
about this: spammers neither know nor care who you are. Most
addresses are "harvested" from the net by software robots and
sold by the million. Some are "discovered" by trying every combination
of words and letters that could be expected to appear in front
of @hotmail.com - a process that takes months. Either way, once
you have made it onto one list, it's just a matter of time before
you are on five, 10, 50 or 1,000...
If you are already
being deluged with spam, consider changing your email address.
And rather than using one new address, use three or four. Try
to keep your "real" address secret by giving it only to close
friends and reliable companies, and make sure you never publish
it anywhere in harvestable form. For example, write it in a way
that people can read but most software can't:
J i m d o t S m i t
h %at% abc.co.uk, or whatever.
If you are obliged
to provide a dubious source with a working email address, use
a Yahoo or Hotmail address created for the purpose. Indeed, SpamCon and
other suppliers offer DEAs or disposable email addresses that
can be used for posting to Usenet newsgroups and similar purposes.
Remember, you don't
have to provide any truthful information in order to get a web-based
email address. You can certainly lie about your age, and I always
give a date of birth that makes me less than 10 years old. This
used to limit the amount of porn and financial spam I received,
though standards have clearly fallen over the past few years.
What
is the best way to view Spam?
When it comes to reading email, the best approach is to delete all the spam
first. To do this in Microsoft's Outlook Express, turn off the Preview Pane:
go to View|Layout and untick the box that says Show Preview Pane. That way,
you can select and delete spam without seeing the contents - and without giving
messages the chance to ask to dial out or download anything from a website.
If you go to View|Layout
and click the button marked Customize Toolbar, you can put a
Preview Pane icon on the toolbar. This lets you turn the Preview
Pane on or off with a single mouse-click.
Most spam is easy to
spot. I delete almost everything that has no Subject line, or
where the subject line is all in caps (I AWAIT YOUR RESPONSE),
anything with my email address in the Subject line, and anything
with odd letters at the end (t cct f). I'm sure I delete some
real mail along with the rubbish, but I'm well past caring. In
fact, I get so much spam at some addresses that I have opened
folders called Real Mail. I move the tiny minority of messages
that don't look like spam to the Real folder and just delete
the rest.
What are mail filters?
Of
course, life would be easier if the spam could be deleted automagically.
This is
done by "mail filters," of which there are two basic types. In
the first case, spam is identified by its characteristics - the
use of certain
combinations of words, for example. In the second case, it is identified
by human beings, who add a rule to the filtering software to
remove that email.
The problem with using
rules is that filtering software will always let some spam through
while also blocking some real mail. These "false positives" worry
ISPs. Also, spam filters may well block newsletters and other
mass mail items: you often have to add these manually to your "whitelist" -
your list of friends' addresses.
Nonetheless, filters
can block a lot of obvious spams. In fact, a new breed of filters
using Bayesian analysis may prove to be almost as good as humans:
see www.paulgraham.com/spam.html.
Examples include Spam
Bully and Spammunition for
Windows, and SpamSieve for
Mac OS X.
Since people are generally
good at spotting spam, the alternative is to have users identify
it, and forward their spam to a blacklisting service. If someone
reports a spam email immediately, this can save millions of people
from receiving
copies of the same spam later. The most interesting example of
this cooperative filtering is Cloudmark's
SpamNet, which currently has about 300,000 users. It is a
free service, but it only works with Microsoft Outlook.
Of course, many filtering
systems use a combination of the two approaches, and this is
probably the best way to go.
There are at least
three ways to have your mail filtered for spam. The first is
to sign up for a filtered mailbox. Technically, Hotmail and Yahoo
fall into this category, since they let you set up a junk mail
folder to hold spam. The problem is that their filtering is not
very good. Better services are offered by SpamEx, SpamCon and
others. I recommend MyRealBox,
which is free.
One big advantage of
filtering systems is that they usually let you block mail on
the server, before you have downloaded it to your PC. The blocking
can be done for you, by an ISP, or you can do it yourself. Brightmail
is the market leader in blocking spam for ISPs. Its service is
used by Cix,
BT Openworld, EasyNet, and MSN, among others.
Installing Software...
You should also install your own filtering software, such as Mailwasher,
McAfee's SpamKiller, SpamEater
Pro or SpamPal for
PC users, or Spamfire for
Mac users. (The mail software in Mac OS X includes spam filtering.) Mailwasher
and SpamPal are free. All work with standard POP3 mailboxes (not AOL). Mailwasher
also works with Hotmail.
Filtering with Mailwasher
is a two stage process. You run Mailwasher first, to scan your
mailboxes and get a list of subject lines. You can then decide
which messages to delete and which to download; you can also "bounce" unwanted
email to suggest that your mailbox is not working.
Of course, it is still
tedious to mark lots of spam for deletion. However, Mailwasher
can mark most spam for you. Go to Tools|Options|General and click
the button to have mail checked against blacklist servers such
as SpamCop. You can edit the list of servers. When you delete
and bounce spam, Mailwasher will blacklist those addresses and
delete any more mail from the same source. Once the spam has
been disposed of, you can download mail as normal.
Blocking spam does
take a bit of effort, but it's usually less effort to do it with
software than to delete it manually. And if you are a dial-up
user, it saves a lot of wasted downloads.
