Hmm, anyone seen Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back? Specifically the ending… Tempting ain’t it? “Did you send me a spam trying to sell before and after viagra porno tapes?” “Umm…Yes?” *THWAP**STOMP**THUD*
Anyway, here’s a quick rundown for anyone that’s interested in trying to cut back on the amount of crud that lands in your inbox. Not a complete list as I should be trying to un-bork some work stuff at the moment but they ain’t paying me enough to work on my own time so stuff ‘em.
1) Never respond to junk e-mail directly, not even to demand that you be removed from their list. This basically tells the spammer your e-mail account is not only active but is read on a regular basis as well. So not only will you probably get a lot more mail from that same source, they’ll probably sell your address on as well.
2) Never use your main e-mail account to sign-up to any on-line service, web site or forum. There’s two ways this can result in more spam heading to your inbox. The first is by the site in question selling your e-mail account on to spammers. The second, and probably less obvious, is programs called ‘web scrapers’. This is basically similar to the way that web search engines build up their indexes of key words, except here the software is looking for anything that matches a normal e-mail address (
[email protected] for example). As part of my system admin job I have to spend a few minutes every month or two checking no-one’s abusing our corporate e-mail accounts and one of our standard tests is to type in our @domain.com part of the e-mail address into google and see what comes back. Give it a try with your e-mail address, you may be surprised.
3) Check with your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and see if they provide any sort of filtering service for Spam. Some do and turn it on by default, some do and require you to request it, and some don’t provide it at all but you won’t know until you ask.
4) Filter your e-mail using the tools in your e-mail program. I can’t provide specific instructions here for every e-mail application but the basic theory is to filter out any message with words and phrasing that suggest it’s spam. So for example you might filter all e-mail with the word “FREE“ in the subject to another folder. I’d recommend moving rather than deleting any e-mails caught by this filter so that you don’t end up zapping something important. This isn’t really a preventive measure of course, but may help a little in managing the flood.
5) Turn off HTML e-mail. Yes, I know it looks pretty, but it’s one of the evilest evil things to ever hit the net. Aside from turning a tiny e-mail into a freakin’ huge HTML message it lets spammers do all sorts of nasty things to confirm you’re a live address. Combine it with Outlook’s preview pane and it’s a nightmare. Example: You download your mail and preview a spam HTML message. As part of that message there’s an image tag, which goes and grabs a suitable image off a web server. If the spammer wants they can add your e-mail address to the image tag and record from the log file that part of the tag. Hey presto, a list of live e-mail addresses. There’s a lot of other nasty tricks you can do this way too, so turning it off is A Good Thing.
6) Pay very close attention when signing up to any service, even from ‘reputable’ companies to any tick boxes. No-one’s agreed on a format for newsletters, mailing lists etc when it comes to either opting in or opting out. I’ve seen more than one site that uses both on the same page with the first check box being an opt-in, the second an opt-out.
7) Apply rule 6 to non web based stuff as well. I recently signed up to a new mobile phone contract where they demanded my e-mail address and guess what was on the bottom of the form? Yep, a ‘we’ll sell your data to anyone if you don’t not tick this box’ bit of blurb.
8) DON’T BUY ANYTHING FROM THESE PEOPLE! Seriously, this is the best way to get this to stop, if it’s totally ineffective the spam will, if not stop totally, die down. Right now it survives on a mix of advertising bucks (yes, some companies actually pay people to spam, and some even complain about attempts to filter the stuff out) and sales, take the sales away and advertising revenue will go with it.
