TIPS and TRICKS
Dealing with your spam problem
E-mail is a great way to communicate. Fast, cheap and very effective, it has become a major part of the modern world, both in recreational and business use. Yet, there is a cloud on the horizon.
Around 80% of the E-mails sent this month (December 2006) were spam, or in other words, unsolicited commercial bulk E-mail. The growth in unwanted E-mail marketing is astounding, as we can notice by looking backwards a bit. In late 2003, spam accounted for 55% of E-mail traffic and in 2002, only a miniscule portion, 2.3% out of all E-mail messages, was spam.
Spam has increased up to a point where it is reducing the value of E-mail as a communication tool. Many are forced to switch E-mail addresses, discontinue publishing their E-mail among the other contact information on web pages and most annoying of all, sort through billions of offers for a cheap m0rt.gag3 or for pills that (supposedly would) make their private parts grow disproportionately.
I'm one of those people. For a while now, I've been receiving so much spam that sorting through my E-mail has become a real pain. That is, until one day when I finally figured out that there must be a better way to do this. Immediately, I did some research and not surprisingly, found several methods that took my Inbox away from the control of spammers and gave it back to me.
If you're also getting more spam than you'd like to, then please take a peak at these couple of tips on what you can do about it. They might not eliminate your spam problem completely, but I guarantee that they will make it much less disturbing.
1. Get proper filtering software
A good E-mail filter has, in my opinion, two qualities. First, it is reasonably easy to install and to use. Second, it is based on adaptive filtering that learns which messages you consider to be spam and which to be useful. Filters that work based on certain keywords, such as "v.i.a.g.r.a" or "mortgage" are too easily fooled and too prone to classifying good E-mail as spam and vice a versa.
Of course, there are many alternatives available, but my personal choice is SpamBayes. Not only does it fill the above requirements, but it is also completely free of charge. SpamBayes needs a couple of weeks of training to become really effective, but after that, it sorts your mail for you with an astounding accuracy.
(A word of warning, though: At the time of writing, SpamBayes suffers from a very annoying bug that occasionally corrupts its training database, forcing you to retrain it to weed out spam from your legitimate E-mail. I recommend that you read their FAQ section concerning this issue and use pickle storage from the get-go)
2. Obfuscate your E-mail address
Should you run a web site like I do, I highly recommend that you take some special measures when displaying your E-mail address. One of the most common ways for spammers to find their victims is to use special software to scan the World Wide Web for E-mail addresses. These addresses are then stored into a database and bombarded with spam.
You can prevent yourself from getting into dozens of E-mail databases, if you use methods that present your E-mail address in a way that allows humans to contact you easily, but makes it hard for spam-bots to get a hold of your E-mail.
There are several web sites dedicated to this matter, but to give an example, one good one is Tim Williams' site. It contains many methods, from simple to complicated, that can be used to hide your E-mail address. My favorite, the HTML encoding method, seems to be sufficient for now - but for more security, you might be tempted to go with the JavaScript techniques.
Those interested in using JavaScript to hide their E-mail address are also recommended to read this excellent article about the subject from Webmarks. The detailed explanations and screenshots give a good idea on how JavaScript can protect your E-mail address.
To go a bit further, it might be wise to do a Google search using your own E-mail address. This way, you can find out if any sites are displaying your E-mail in un-encoded form and allowing spammers to pluck it like a ripe cherry. Should that be happening, you would perhaps want to contact the owner of the web site and ask him to remove your address or encode it.
3. Turn off your preview feature
E-mail addresses are valuable to spammers, but their value rises even higher when it becomes clear that spam sent to the address is being read. Several people who send bulk e-mail use HTML and include links to images in their advertisements. These links often lead to an unique address in a server that is controlled by the spammer, allowing him to deduct who has read his advertisement by looking at which URL's were used to request the image.
Simply put, whenever you open a spam, you're telling the spammer that his junk is getting through. To prevent that, you need to either disable HTML E-mail completely, or as I prefer to, switch off the preview feature that many E-mail programs have and only open those E-mails that surely are not spam. If you're unsure on how to turn off the previewing of messages, here are some instructions for Outlook and Outlook Express.
4. Use your brains
When you do get spam, never respond to it or attempt to remove yourself from the list. The E-mail will either go to an address that is not in use or to someone who has nothing to do with the spam and has just been 'framed' to look like he is the original author.
In a worst-case scenario, your request will reach the spammer, merely notifying him that your address is functional. If they would really respect your privacy enough to remove you upon your request, they probably wouldn't be bothering you without your permission in the first place, right?
Of course, under any conditions, do not request more information, do not click on any links and for heaven's sake, do not buy whatever it is they are attempting to sell you. The same product is available out there in the real world, just with better quality and at a more affordable price. If you really have erection problems, go to a doctor instead of buying vitamin B badged as Viagra from some shady guy off the Internet.
