Managing Spam

We all know that SPAM is that processed meat product invented by Hormel Foods Corporation around World War II. The question is, however, how did it become associated with junk e-mail? On December 15, 1970, the British television show "Monty Python's Flying Circus" first aired episode 25 in which there was a skit where everything on the menu in this cafe had SPAM in it; unfortunately the poor customer did not want SPAM. Making matters worse, there was a group of Vikings in the café who kept singing a chorus of spam, spam, spam . . . " in an increasing crescendo eventually drowning out all other conversation. This skit became an analogy to what junk e-mail was going to do to legitimate e-mail communication.

While much of the other advice on this page will help protect kids from spam there are a few extra things parents should do to protect their children from offensive spam. First and foremost, choose an obscure hard to guess e-mail address. Then instruct children they may only give their e-mail address to friends they personally know (not strangers or people they meet on the Internet) and to NEVER give it out in any Web site, news group, chat room, etc. without your permission. Before giving your permission, know why the e-mail address is needed and read the Web site's privacy statement. A better practice would be to provide your own e-mail address or a disposable one. If your child starts to receive spam (especially obscene spam) via e-mail, have them abandon their e-mail address and get a new one. Once an e-mail address is tainted it will never be safe again.

The most important advice to keep your children safe from obscene spam is to supervise their use of the Internet. The best way to do this is to not allow children to have Internet connected computers in their room. In a household with children Internet connected computers should only be kept in family/living rooms. While the Internet can be a very valuable learning tool, it is also a very wild and dangerous place. Just as one wouldn't let their child walk alone down a dark city street in an unfamiliar neighborhood, they should not let a child use the Internet unsupervised.

Not choosing the wrong e-mail address is an important factor in determining how much spam one receives. Here are several things to consider when choosing an e-mail address:

• The following e-mail addresses are big spam magnets and should not be used: webmaster@, info@, humanresources@ sales@. The reason is that these are the most common e-mail addresses and spammers often times just assume they exist.
• Don't use HotMail, Yahoo, AOL and other major e-mail providers for your primary e-mail address; use your own domain name instead. Spammers know that there are millions accounts with the big e-mail providers and thus target them with more aggressive spamming techniques than they do small entities. If you must use one of the major e-mail providers choose an obscure e-mail address that would be resistant to a dictionary attack.

The first line of defense against spam is avoiding it in the first place. There are several things individuals should and should not do to avoid spam:

• Do not post e-mail addresses on web pages. Instead of posting one's e-mail address on a web page, Web sites should have contact forms (like we use) that facilitate the sending of a message. The reason is that spammers use automated software to surf the Internet and harvest e-mail addresses from Web pages.
• Do not post e-mail addresses in newsgroups or forums. Instead use an obscured e-mail address (e.g. someuser AT nowhere DOT com or someuser@nowhere.NOSPAM.com) that a human could figure out and turn into the real e-mail address but a computer program could not. If obscuring the e-mail address is not an option, use a disposable e-mail address and then get rid of it when it starts to get too much spam.
• Don't sign up for fantasy sports leagues, chances to win free stuff, joke of the day, etc. Often times free stuff give-a-ways are simply a method to collect e-mail addresses to send advertisements to. Signing up for fantasy sports leagues, game sites, joke of the day, etc. tends to be the worst generator of spam. If you really must sign up for these types of things, use a disposable e-mail address that you can abandon once it starts getting too much spam.
• Opt out of e-mail lists and make sure merchants don't share your e-mail address with others. If you do conduct business with a merchant via e-mail, make sure to opt out of any e-mail lists they use and make sure they don't share/sell your personal data to others. Read the privacy policy of a site before sending the merchant an e-mail.
• Turn off the preview pane. In Outlook and Outlook Express, one should turn off the preview pane for their e-mail so that spam is not displayed. The reason is that often times spam has embedded into it special graphics, which are pulled from a web site and let the spammer know when a message sent to a specific e-mail address has been viewed. This allows them to create a refined list of known good e-mail addresses that they can then sell to others. Turning off the preview pane prevents these messages from being inadvertently displayed there by denying the sender this method of confirming the legitimacy of an e-mail address.
• Never open spam. The reason is that by simply opening a piece of spam you may inform the spammer that your e-mail address is legitimate because of specially coded graphics in the message.
• Never reply to spam--not even to unsubscribe. Many spammers offer false unsubscribe promises to trick people into confirming that their e-mail address is real. As a result often times, clicking on the unsubscribe link simply increases the amount of spam one receives. In other cases the reply e-mail address is simply a bogus e-mail address or the e-mail address of an innocent victim.
• NEVER EVER PURCHASE ANYTHING as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message! Spammers send out spam because it is profitable. If people would stop buying things advertised to them via unsolicited e-mail, it would not be profitable for the spammers and they would give up.

For many users, the advice above is kind of like closing the barn door after the horse escaped. While the advice might help slow the increase in the quantity of spam, it does nothing to eliminate the current quantity of spam being received. To tackle this issue there are really only two solutions. If it is an option, the most effective method for eliminating spam is to simply abandon the e-mail address in question. If this is not an option then utilizing spam filters will provide some relief.

For the most part individuals who use a Web based e-mail application like Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook Web Access, etc. will be dependent upon the spam filters provided by their e-mail provider. If, however, individuals download their e-mail to their computer using a program like Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Pegasus Mail, Eudora, etc.; there is a wider range of filtering options available. A select few of the scores of options available are:

MailWasher

MailWasher is free to use and won't ever expire. It works with Outlook, Outlook Express, Incredimail, Thunderbird, Windows Mail, GMail, Hotmail and every other email program. Other features include:

• View e-mail on the server before it gets to your computer
• Delete e-mail or bounce spam back to sender
• Friends and blacklist support
• Inbuilt fuzzy logic to detect spam
• Attractive, easy to use interface
• Works with POP3 (Outlook, Outlook Express, Pegasus Mail, Endura, etc.), MSN, Hotmail

Operating systems supported

Windows 98, NT 4, ME, 2000, XP, Vista

Cloudmark SpamNet

This add-in for Outlook compares incoming e-mail against a database of known spam. If it matches something in the database, the suspect e-mail is moved to a folder marked Spam. The database is constantly updated via the collective efforts of over 400,000 users. If a piece of spam gets missed by SpamNet, simply click a voting button in Outlook and the message's "fingerprint" is added to your spam definitions. Friends that use this software have told us that it works very well. Some drawbacks to this software are that instead of being a one time fee like MailWasher it is based on a monthly subscription, which at last check was around $4.00 per month ($48.00 per year) and that it only runs on Microsoft Outlook 2000 or Outlook XP.

Operating systems supported

Windows 2000, XP 32-bit, Vista 32-bit
Mac OS X 10.4.7 or higher

SpamCop.Net

Rather than being a piece of software that has to be installed, this is a hosted service that you have your e-mail redirect through prior to your downloading it. You simply have your e-mail forwarded to their servers and then configure your e-mail software to download your e-mail from their servers. The great thing about this is that you don't have to worry about installing any software on your computer or having to deal with compatibility issues. The cost is $30.00 per year ($2.50 per month)

Operating systems supported

Not applicable