How can I fight Spam?

Unsolicited, junk e-mail, known as spam, is more than just an annoyance. This article provides useful tips which can help you remove or at least minimize spam from your inbox.

What is Spam? How do "spammers" get my email address?

Spam is unsolicited, junk e-mail sent you to by a person you don't know. Usually it contains a marketing message that is trying to get you to purchase a product or service. The origin of the term "spam" comes from a canned ham product from Hormel.

Network admins hate Spam because it hogs lots of bandwidth required to run their networks. Typical computer users eventually loathe downloading their email because of all the junk messages they receive.

How to avoid being spammed? Actually you can do something before buying anti-spam software which filters junk email out of your inbox. To avoid spamming you have to know how spammers can get your email address and how to prevent this from happening.

Here are most common ways spammers use to gather email addresses:

From web pages and forums
Spammers have software which spiders through web pages, looking for email addresses, e.g. email addresses contained in mailto: HTML tags (those you can click on and get a mail window opened).

From mailing lists
Spammers frequently attempt to get the lists of subscribers to mailing lists (some mail servers give those upon special request).

From UseNet posts
Spammers scan UseNet for email address, utilizing programs (robots or spiders) designed to do this. Some programs just look at articles headers which contain email address (From:, Reply-To:, etc), while others check the articles' bodies, starting with programs that look at signatures, through programs that take everything that contain a '@' character.

From a Web Browser
Some sites use various tricks to extract a surfer's email address from the web browser, sometimes without the surfer noticing it. Usually spammers use Java script in order to obtain the email address but there few other tricks.

From IRC and chat rooms
Some IRC clients give a user's email address to anyone who requests it. Many spammers gather email addresses from IRC, knowing that those are 'live' and existing addresses.

By guessing
Some spammers guess email addresses, send a test message (or a real spam) to a list which includes the guessed addresses. Then they wait for either an error message to return by email, indicating that the email address is correct, or for a confirmation. Then there are programs that come up with random words and common names and pop them together. So if you are jtailor@abc.com, the spam programs might effortlessly find you because they will test atailor, btailor, tailor_a, tailor_b and all kinds of other combinations.

Using social engineering
This method means the spammers attempt to persuade people of giving them existing E-mail addresses. So some Spam e-mails come with offer to send a reply message in order to "unsubscribe". But sending the reply will serve to confirm that your email works and cause you to receive even more spam.

Buying lists from others
Some spammers use the methods described above in order to sell it to other spammers. Sometimes even legitimate companies sell their user database addresses to spammers.

How to avoid Spam?

Now, after we know how those nasty spammers get our e-mail addresses, here are top tips on how to avoid them from doing that.

• Stay anonymous
  Never add your address to Internet email directories. When you're on the Web, leave the email address field in generic Web forms blank.
• Use 2 email accounts
  Make one your primary account that you give out to people known to you (friends, family, and colleagues). Use the other account for your public activity (mailing lists, newsgroups, or Web forms). If your ISP doesn't provide a second address at no charge, get a free Web-based email account.
• Scramble your address
  If you post public messages to newsgroups or Web discussion boards, you can limit the amount of Spam sent to you by spoofing your email address. Adding extra characters or words to your outgoing address confuses spammer's programs which attempt to gather your address. You can make the change in your email application's preferences. If your real address is jtailor@abc.com, a scrambled version would be jtailor_antispam@abc.com or jtailor@abc_removethis.com. Be sure to add instructions in your signature file that explain how to decode your address so you can receive legitimate replies, but don't include your actual email address because spammers scan the contents of all posts.
• Set up spam filtering
  Most e-mail clients like Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook, TheBat! and Netscape Messenger be set up to filter incoming emails. Usually it can be done by creating special rules for incoming messages. So if a message doesn't include your correct email address in the To: or Cc: field, trash it (you can also use special folder called "Spam" for such messages). Take note of the domains that regularly send you unsolicited mail, and create rule to block messages coming from them. You can also set rules to filter messages with specific characters (e.g. "$") or words (e.g. "Viagra", "Loan", "Dept" etc) in the subject line.
• Don't reply to Spam messages
  As mentioned above a reply verifies to the spammer that your email address is valid. If you're angry enough about it, complain to the ISP that hosts the spammer. However finding out where Spam mail originated can be difficult . Open the message and look for IP addresses or domains within parentheses in the header's Received lines (information outside the parentheses could be faked), then verify them using WhoEasy or other whois service.

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