Too much spam!Studies show that unsolicited or “junk” e-mail, known as spam, accounts for more than half of all e-mail messages received. Although once regarded as little more than a nuisance, the tsunami of spam has increased to the point where many users have begun to express a profound lack of confidence in the effectiveness of e-mail transmissions, and increased concern over the spread of computer viruses via unsolicited messages.

Unfortunately, spam is very hard to fight at the source. It’s not for the lack of trying: already in 2003 U.S. President Bush signed the “Can Spam” bill, prohibiting senders of unsolicited commercial email from using false return addresses, using dictionaries to generate such mails, and the use of misleading subject lines. It also requires that emails include an opt-out mechanism. The legislation also prohibits senders from harvesting addresses from websites. Fine, excellent, admirable… but I haven’t seen any decrease in spam since. You?

Fight spamThe reason why it is so hard to snuff spam at the root, is the international character of what’s aptly called the World Wide Web. Nowadays, spam rarely comes from one’s own country, but usually from banana republics and coconut kingdoms halfway across the globe. Such emails are much harder to fight, because they’re sent from outside the jurisdiction of our own laws and regulations. Those regulations and laws are fine and good and necessary and all that, but they’re hardly likely to stop the problem, nor can they reasonably be expected to do so under the circumstances. So what can we do about the spam issue?

The one truly effective solution is getting rid of your computer and revert to snail mail, but that’s a bit drastic. However, there are several things you can do to at least minimize the amount of spam that’s coming your way. We’ll give you five fairly simple and effective measures you can take.

  1. Do what you can to avoid having your email address out on the net.

    There are products called “spam spiders” that search the Internet for email addresses to send email to. To fight them you may use form emails which can hide addresses, and/or use addresses like sales@company.com instead of your full address. There are also programs that “scramble” your email, like jsGuard, which encodes your email address on web pages so that spam spiders find it difficult or impossible to read your email address.

  2. Get spam blocking software.

    There are many programs out there for this, free as well as paid. A couple of freebies are available from Cloudmark and Mailwasher. You may also buy a professional version. Whatever you do, get the software. No, these applications are not foolproof, but they really do help. You usually have to do some manual set up to block certain types of email.

  3. Use the multiple email address approach.

    There are a lot of free email addresses to be had. If you must subscribe to newsletters, then have a “back-up” email address. It would be like giving your sell phone number to your best friends and the business number to everyone else.

  4. Attachments from people you don’t know are BAD, BAD, BAD.

    Email can have attachments and attachments can have viruses. Corporations often have filters, but personal email is far more open to spammers. General rule of thumb: if you do not know who is sending you something, do not open the attachment! Secondly, look for services that offer filtering. Firewall vendors offer this type of service as well.

  5. Use “bulk-mail”, “junk” or “spam” baskets.

    If your email provider does not support this, consider moving to another. The concept is simple. If you know someone, they can send you emails. If you don’t know them, put them in the bulk email pile and then “choose” to allow them into your circle. Spam Blocking software has this concept as well, but having extra layers seems critical these days.

Jaap Verduijn

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Filed under: Preventing and killing spam

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