Fighting Email Spam
It seems no matter what you do, your email account gets filled with spam emails. You try to fight it, but it seems the spammers always find a way around your defenses. But there are some almost effortless steps you can take to make their actions unsuccessful.If spammers had to acquire email addresses and send their unwanted ads out one at a time, it would not be worth their effort. But, they can use automation to make it very simple for them to spam hundreds and thousands of people at once.
But, you can fight against them. Yes, programs make spam possible, but programs can also help eliminate spam. But in order to know which anti-spam programs to choose, it helps to know exactly how the spammers work.
Spammers love spambots! These are programs that browse web sites looking for email addresses of unsuspecting users. Once it finds these addresses, it harvests them and stores them in a large list. This list can then be used by the spammer or sold to others who what to send out mass mailings.
While there aren’t any perfect answers to spoiling spambots, there are a few things you can do.
- If you do not ever expose your email address, it cannot be harvested by a spambot. But, most people love to use blogs, forums, and other public web sites that all require an email address to register then post. What you can do is use an email address specifically for registering at those sites. So you would have a personal email address and one for registering at sites. If you only give your personal email address to people you trust, this can greatly cut down on spam in that particular account. In the past, many people have used free email accounts from places such as Yahoo and Hotmail as their registration email addresses. You need never check the registration email address, so if it get spam, it is no problem. However, some sites have become aware of people doing this and no longer accept addresses from those sites.
- While spambots are quite knowledgeable, they are not as smart as humans. There are subtle distinctions, which we can make, but they cannot. The program can only do what it is instructed to do. You may be able to disguise your email address from them by making just a simple change such as replacing the @ sign with the letters “_at_” in your email configuration. In most cases, you can configure your email client to say your email address is anything you want. Even if this altered email address is acquired by the spambot, it will need to be scrubbed to be usable. The scrub routines, which clean up email addresses, are harder to write than the spambots because they would need to contain many variants of what to search and replace with. While it would be easy for a human to convert jsmith_at_aol.com, the spambot would need to be specifically configured to replace the _at_ with @. However, this may have some drawbacks too. A human would have to strip out the _at_ and replace it with @, but sometimes they don’t understand that needs to be done, either because they don’t know what is going on or they simply hit the “Reply to” button. And email systems are often not smart enough to replace the extra characters with the @ sign because they are automated just like the spambots.
- Spam or junk mail filters try to determine if mail coming into your account is spam or legitimate. It will check your email address book to see if the sender’s email address is in it and if not, it will send that email to a “Junk” folder. This is not always perfect though, because if the email address of a friend or colleague changes and you receive an email from the new address, it may be send to the “Junk” folder. You can however alter the algorithms used by the filter to help it make better guesses as to whether email is spam or not.
If you can do these few things to try to deter the spammers, they may decide the effort just isn’t worth it. If everyone could make the spammers effort cost more than their potential return, it might help curb spam mail for everyone involved. So far, that is not the case, but people are constantly working on ways to end spam forever.
January 14th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
[...] Spammers are able to harvest email addresses from forums, blogs, and other activities you do online. Their spambots take very little time and effort to obtain all these email addresses that they can then use to spam email accounts or sell to others. They exert very little effort to be able to do this while most of us spend quite a bit of time either deleting spam or trying to figure out how to stop it. If the cost of spammer’s job was raised, it might help put the ball in your court, rather than theirs.Some end-user techniques were previously discussed in Part I, and some of those can even be used by webmasters on whose sites your email address resides. Here are a couple of examples for webmasters: [...]