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DISCLAIMER: All the information contained in this page, or any linked from it, is provided as is, having no warranty or support of any kind, and is used entirely at your own risk.
Words of spam
Welcome to my page of spam, the scourge of email, unwanted junk mail. This page is a collection of tips that will help you to minimize the amount of spam you receive. Its based on a email protection paper I wrote a few years back for a client, and now with there permission is been available to all. Anyway onwards
Most people will have just the single email account that there ISP supplied them with, and they will use this for everything, which is all well and good, but expect to be spammed to death as soon as you sign up for your first news letter, post to the news groups, or even send a email to a friend.
Yes its possible for your email address to end up in the hands of spammers just by you sending an email onto a friend. For example you send a joke to a friend, your address will be in the header, now your friend sends it onto others, and so on, soon half the world knows your email address, including the enemy, the spammer.
While this sounds implausible, its very possible, I actually tested this a few years back. I sent a joke onto a friend who then sent it on etc. Soon that account I used was getting spam, and no one knows where the spammers got the address from. So be warned, and yes I canceled that test account.
No, I am not trying to put anyone off using email, just to make sure you are aware that spammers will get your address, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. In my case I have a private address that I only use to email friends, family etc, (nothing to be passed on to anyone), and I get some spam on that account.
Now you are worried, I come to the good news, all is not lost you can minimize the amount of spam you receive, the following tips have reduced both mine and others spam to manageable levels. And yes before I get emails, some are just common sense :-)
If you are looking for the known spammer domain block list, then all is not lost it can be found here
Email addresses
Do not keep to one single email address and use it for everything. As I said above this is only asking for spam, instead get several and use them for different things. No this will not be expensive, as you can use one of the many free, WEB based email providers such as hotmail. The other advantage of these types of email accounts is that they are easily killed if you are excessively spammed.
For example I use the following different accounts.
- A dummy account for anything to with news groups
- Hotmail accounts for every news letter I subscribe to
- ozetechnology.com mail for anything work related
- one pobox.com account for anything private
Now this may look like lots of hassle to check all of these accounts, well if you consider that before I used this many accounts, my one account was getting several hundred spam mails per day, some carrying nasties like viruses and Trojans. Now Hotmail gets all the spam not me, I just delete it via the browser, which greatly reduces the virus risk, and saves me much time. With the pobox and ozetechnology accounts, well every recent email client I have seen will automatically check multiple accounts with no problems.
pobox.com
Now you will see from the above that I mention pobox.com well they are a email redirection service that I use for my private account. There are many advantages of this, for example, you to keep one email address regardless of how many times you change ISP, which does make life much easier, just think no longer will you have to notify your whole address book when you move ISP?
As part of this service they also provide some fairly good spam filters, that you can configure depending on how much you hate spam. For more information have a look at this page
Now before anyone emails me, I have no connection what so ever with pobox.com other than have used their service for several years.
News Groups
These are one of the most popular sources, that the spammer will look for email addresses, they run a automated app (known as a bot) that will harvest email address from news group postings. There is no way to stop this, but you can limit the damage.
To avoid your address falling into the hands of the spammers this way, there is one simple rule.
Never use your private address, use Hotmail or even a dummy address only
By a dummy address, I mean one thats totally fake, let the spammers waste time on spamming nothing!. An example would be.
spam@spammer.spam
WEB Mail (Hotmail etc)
Above I mentioned using a WEB mail service such as Hotmail as one way to avoid spam, well there is a fairly recent problem with some of these accounts. Which is when you sign up, you are agreeing to them giving your address out to spammers, unless you say not to. So read the sign up screens very carefully. Below are some of the WEB mail services available.
Subscriptions
These days there are a never ending number of sites that ask you for a email address for some form of news letter, registration etc. These things are another source of email address for the spammers, who buy these lists from the site operators. One thing to note, is that not all these site operators sell to spammers, but better to be safe than spammed, assume all do. So as with the news groups, the same rule.
Never use your private address, use Hotmail or even a dummy address only
Spam Filters
Many of the email apps in use today have some form of filtering capability, which I strongly recommend that you use to block spam, see your apps help for more on how to do this. In addition to this and if you, like me really hate spam, you can go further and run a app that actually deletes spam from the mail server before you download it. One that comes to mind is Mail washer, although being 100% UNIX based I have no personal experience, so cannot comment on how good it is.
For UNIX users such as myself, I use email sanitizer which works with procmail to provide aggressive filtering.
To find a filter thats right for your specific needs, have a look at this.
What to do with spam
When spam arrives in any of your accounts there are a number of things to do and not to do, they are.
To do (ALWAYS)
- Delete it without opening it.
- If you have opened it, you need to delete it then run a virus and spyware scan
Do not do (EVER)
- Open it (it could be infected with a virus)
- Never reply to it (this just confirms your email address is good)
- Never use anything that says un-subscribe (this again just confirms your address is good)
- Never visit any of the site contained in spam (who knows what they are)
- Never run any attachments to spam (could be virus, Trojans or other nasties)
Links and Related Pages
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